This year’s Alma Hawkins Visiting Chair is Odissi dancer, choreographer, and scholar Bijayini Satpathy. During Fall Quarter 2025, Satpathy will teach a project-based course culminating in an end-of-quarter performance, as well as a special topics class drawing on her expertise. She will also present a public talk on Monday, Oct. 27, from 5–6:30 p.m. in Room 200, Kaufman Hall.
Her courses include Dance 117C: Odissi's Guidance, in which students will learn to choreograph works in their own dance genres using compositional principles from Odissi dance, and Dance C174B: The Living Archive, a project-based course in which she will create a choreography to be performed at the department’s faculty concert in Week 10.
The Hawkins Chair expands WACD’s offerings by emphasizing diversity of forms, geographies, and perspectives, giving students a stronger sense of global dance practices. As a rotating position, the Chair allows students each year to engage deeply with a different choreographer of extraordinary stature.
About Bijayini Satpathy
Bijayini Satpathy, a preeminent master of Odissi on the global stage, has enjoyed a prolific career spanning more than three decades. Her first self-choreographed work, Abhipsaa - A Seeking, received commissions from Duke Performances, Baryshnikov Arts Center, and was supported by NEFA's National Dance Project. Satpathy has served as the artist-in-residence at the Metropolitan Museum during 2021-22, culminating in four gallery presentations and an evening length production, Doha. In 2020, Satpathy received the prestigious New York Dance and Performance Bessie Award, and was recognized as the best solo dancer by Dance Magazine in 2019. Her outstanding contributions to Odissi in education and performance were honored again with the Dance Magazine Award in 2023. Satpathy has been a fellow at the Center for Ballet Arts, New York, and a fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio, in 2024, to further her research on Odissi performance and training pedagogy. In India, Bijayini Satpathy has received coveted awards like Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar, Mahari Dancer Award, and Nrityachoodamani.