Student Profile

Anuj Vaidya
Performance Studies

Anuj Vaidya is a media maker, curator, and educator, who is currently pursuing his doctorate in Performance Studies at UC Davis. His praxis engages a diverse range of forms and strategies that include theater and performance, multi-media installation and story-telling, social practice, curatorial practice, arts education, and artivism. Deeply invested in collaboration, Vaidya seeks to break down the divide between artist and audience by engaging them not only as content consumers but also as co-creators through participatory processes. His work pays due attention to the material, social, and intellectual impacts of our storytelling and media technologies, reminding us that we must be attentive to both the footprint and the brain-print of the stories we tell.

His project, Forest Tales, is a femi-queer SF eco-cinema retelling that swims in the South Asian Sitayana epic tradition. As a speculative cinema project, it not only narrates eco-tales at the horizon of the sixth extinction, but also reimagines the cinematic process/apparatus, revealing cinema as a corporeal and land-based practice. Alongside this performed cinema project, Vaidya is the founding member of numerous collaborative projects and collectives including: 

Larval Rock Stars, a multi-modal collaboration with artist-scholar Praba Pilar(prabapilar.org/larval-rock-stars), that sits at the cusp of the bio-techno-critical and the absurd

The Hypha Collective, in collaboration with Stephanie Maroney, which brings together artists, students, and community members to explore cultural and artistic practices that involve fungus and fermentation, and 

YoloSol (yolosol.org), in collaboration with Juliette Beck and Patwin/Wintun culture-bearer Diana Almendariz, that cultivates place-based civic engagement and learning about issues of environmental and racial justice in Yolo county through arts and storytelling, and creative nature-based and multi-media cultural activities.

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