About

Gurmukhi is an Indian-American dance artist interested in exploring the intersections of culture, heritage, and identity as they manifest within her personal movement vocabulary. As someone redefining and understanding her artistic voice, she is invested in examining and subsequently decolonizing popular perception of the south Asian body and its role within various performance spaces. She hopes to use her investigations as a mechanism to unravel and eventually understand her own diasporic identity. Her personal practice is heavily influenced by training in: bharatnatyam, ballet, and rhythmic gymnastics. She received her BA in dance from UCLA, and is now unwilling to part with the department.

Areas of Interest

Her investigations center the politics of migration, and its implications as a tool of social upheaval - particularly in the context of the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan. She aims to understand how the process of migration alters implementation and perception of functional community. Memory plays an active role in her exploration of the partition narrative. Her research questions how bodies cultivate, preserve, and interact with memory, and how generational trauma may manifest as embodied memory within a diasporic body. As a descendant of partition survivors, she is specifically devoted to dissecting how bodies hold space for memories they have not (personally) experienced, and how engagement with those memories may be used to sustain modernity while preserving cultural tradition.