About

Moodzi (Abhijeet Mudgerikar) is a performance artist and scholar whose work unfolds at the intersection of social dance activism, gender experimentation, cultural geography, and interactive systems. Their practice investigates how bodies become politicized through place, and how embodied practices negotiate and reshape social hierarchies, urbanity, and transnational flows.

Their research is informed by their undergraduate training in architecture and sustained engagement with queer Black social dances in India, through which they draw connections among space, migration, and cross-cultural interaction. At UCLA. they are studying the etymology and cultural circulation of nazar—translated as gaze, perception, and the “evil eye”—from its Arabic origins to its regional transformations across South Asia. Approaching nazar as an embodied yet relational mode of perception, they investigate how it operates through contact, media, and ritual.

This inquiry informs their capstone performance, which traces their migration from Ahmedabad to Los Angeles and critiques binaries that fail to account for queer minoritarian experiences. They received the Asian Cultural Council Graduate Fellowship twice to support this work, premiering in Spring 2026. They are also part of the Urban Humanities Initiative by cityLAB this year to examine care as a critical spatial practice.

AREAS OF INTEREST:

Transnational performance, queer worldmaking, Black social dance, urban spatial politics, interactive media and technology, cultural geography.