2024 Choreography FELLOW
Photo by Canaan Mattson
Pramila Vasudevan is a movement-centered artist, cultural worker, and maker of
community-rooted/routed transdisciplinary work. Vasudevan is the founder and artistic
director of Aniccha Arts (est. 2004), an arts collaborative producing site-specific
performances that examine agency, voice, and group dynamics within community
histories, institutions, and systems. She is an artist associate of Pillsbury House Theatre.
She has been honored with a Joyce Award (2022), and also United States Artists (2022),
Guggenheim (2017) and McKnight Choreography Fellowship (2016). Vasudevan has been
invested in cultivating art spaces and artist growth as the director of Naked Stages
(2016–21), a fellowship program for early-career performance artists at Pillsbury House
Theatre, and as a teaching artist with Upstream Arts (2015–19), which activates and
amplifies the voice and choice of individuals with disabilities at every stage of life.
Her current practice involves gardening, hosting conversations and community
gatherings, and developing improvisational movement sessions inspired by growing
practices in gardens and greenhouses and by plant cycles in the urban park systems.
Her work engages with physical sites, ranging from human-constructed locations (like a
suburban parking ramp) to natural environments (such as along the Mississippi River).
In this process, she learns about the site’s history and current uses, the people that
have come and gone, the embedded politics, and the materials that physically make it
what it is. In responding artistically, Vasudevan orients from the body while layering in
other media (sound, drawings, sculptural elements, and so on) that illuminate a
multiplicity of perspectives.