Affiliation Years
2021-2022
Department:
Theater and Performance Studies
Dissertation Title
Performing Entanglement: More-than-Human Repertoires in South Asia

Rishika Mehrishi is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Theater and Performance Studies (TAPS). She holds a BA (honors) in History from Delhi University, and an MA in Performance Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. Her research interest in human-nonhuman performances in South Asia intersects multispecies ethnography, new materialism, and postcolonial studies. Her dissertation, Performing Entanglement: More-than-Human Repertoires in South Asia, concerns the way animal materialities and metaphors shape contemporary discourses on caste, religion, gender, and sexuality in South Asia. Her writings have appeared or are forthcoming in Theater Journal, Modern Drama, Marg Magazine and The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. She has been an Asian Cultural Council Grantee, served as the Carl Weber Memorial Fellow at TAPS, Stanford (2019-2021), and is currently a Graduate Dissertation Fellow at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE), Stanford.

Rishika is also a performance artist and makes durational art that draws heavily on everyday rituals and laboring bodies. She has performed at various festivals and performance venues in New York City. In 2018, she conceived and performed in Out of Breath, a piece about migrant worker crises, at Stanford University. Rishika’s expertise in archiving lies at the cusp of her academic and artistic pursuits. Before joining Stanford, she worked on theater and performance based archival collections in Delhi, Abu Dhabi, Seoul, and New York. She is currently co-authoring a book on Richard Schechner’s Ramleela archives.