About
Anurima Banerji is Associate Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance. Her research principally concerns critical historicizations of Indian dance and its relationship to the state. Situated in the fields of dance and performance studies, her scholarship is informed by an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach grounded in postcolonial theory, critical race theory, feminist and queer thought, and studies of class, caste, regionalism, and religion in India. As a trained Odissi dancer and poet, she shares the faculty’s commitment to bridging the worlds of academia and artistic practice.
She is the author of the monograph Dancing Odissi: Paratopic Performances of Gender and State (Seagull Books/University of Chicago Press, 2019), which received the 2020 de la Torre Bueno Prize from the Dance Studies Association. Her co-edited projects include The Oxford Handbook of Indian Dance (with Prarthana Purkayastha, Oxford University Press, 2026); How to Do Politics with Art (with Violaine Roussel, Routledge, 2017); and a special issue of Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies on “Decolonizing Dance Discourses” (with Royona Mitra, 2020). She is currently preparing a book-length study on The Impossibility of Indian Classical Dance, as well as co-editing The Oxford Handbook of Dance Praxis (with Royona Mitra and Jasmine Johnson).
Banerji’s scholarly work has garnered numerous distinctions. Recently, her essay “The Epistemic Politics of Indian Classical Dance” was recognized with an Honorable Mention for the 2025 Sally Banes Publication Prize given by the American Society for Theatre Research; it appears in Performance Cultures as Epistemic Cultures, Volume II (Routledge, 2023). In 2013, her article “Dance and the Distributed Body,” published in About Performance, received the Gertrude Lippincott Award from the Society of Dance History Scholars. Earlier, she won the 2007 Outstanding Graduate Research Award from the Congress on Research in Dance for “Paratopias of Performance: The Choreographic Practices of Chandralekha,” later included as a chapter in Planes of Composition: Dance, Theory, and the Global (Seagull Books, 2009). Her additional writings are featured in journals such as Contemporary Theatre Review, Economic and Political Weekly, Shenlunji, South Asian History and Culture, and Women and Performance, alongside the edited volumes Archival Entanglements, The Moving Space: Women in Dance, and The Oxford Handbook of Dance Reenactment.
Banerji was part of a group of artists and scholars who contributed to the exhibition A Slightly Curving Place, curated by Nida Ghouse and presented by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin, Germany and the Alserkal Arts Foundation in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Her associated work is documented in the accompanying books, Coming to Know, volumes I and II.
The American Association of University Women, the American Society for Theatre Research, the Hellman Foundation, the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Advanced Study, and the International Research Center at Freie Universität have generously provided grants and fellowships supporting her research. In Spring 2023, Banerji had the honour of being selected as a Director’s Fellow at the Center for Ballet and the Arts, New York University.
Banerji is affiliated with UCLA's Center for India and South Asia, the Center for Performance Studies, the Center for the Study of Women, and the LGBTQ Studies Program. She has served as guest faculty at the DSA/Mellon Seminar for Emerging Scholars and as guest lecturer at Jawaharlal Nehru University’s School of Art and Aesthetics in New Delhi, India and at the Center for Contemporary Dance at the University of Music and Dance in Cologne, Germany.
She serves on the editorial boards of the peer-reviewed journal South Asian Dance Intersections and the Studies in Dance book series, published by the University of Michigan Press on behalf of the Dance Studies Association.