little fears

Ashwaty Chennat is an interdisciplinary performing artist and performance maker based in Chicago. She grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she studied bharatnatyam with Sudha Chandrasekhar, ballet and jazz with a studio family and South Asian heritage and folk forms with her mother and community artists. Chennat has directed and choreographed several works, including contemporary movement to Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite at Chicago Symphony Center, under conductor Sameer Patel, Moods of Nayika a drag and dance film in collaboration with Abhijeet, Beaten Path a suite with jazz percussionist and composer Alvin Cobb Jr. and Masks and Myths a retelling of the World's Fair from the "exhibited" at the Logan Center for the Arts, produced by Mandala South Asian Performing Arts. Her process includes long conversations, considerations of cultural structures and their thresholds and play. Her work often revisits familiar narratives, centers what and who is excluded and then reimagines.