Dr. Smitha Radhakrishnan

🪔 About

Dr. Smitha Radhakrishnan is a distinguished diasporic Bharatanatyam dancer, choreographer, and educator, known for her focus on connecting traditional expressive movement with contemporary personal, social, and political themes. She began her Bharatanatyam training at the age of five and has since trained continuously with prominent teachers in both the U.S. and India, including Asha Gopal (Phoenix), Katherine Kunhiraman (Berkeley), Padmini Ravi (Bangalore), Girija Chandran (Thiruvananthapuram), Prakriti Bhaskar (Mumbai), Chitra Chandrasekar Dasarathy (Bangalore), and Dr. Aparna Sindhoor (Boston and Los Angeles). Beyond Bharatanatyam, Dr. Radhakrishnan also spent over a decade training in contemporary dance, theatre, and Indian martial arts, performing and touring with Navarasa Dance Theater (Boston and Los Angeles). Her extensive performance career includes hundreds of solo and group productions across New England, California, and South Africa, where she performed and taught with the Surialanga Dance Company of Durban. In 2003, she co-founded the original NATyA Dance Company with Vallari Shah, co-producing and performing over 80 shows and four original productions in the California Bay Area. In 2015, she established NATyA Dance in Natick, MA, and currently serves as the Artistic Director of NATyA Dance Collective. The Collective is an ensemble of rigorously trained Bharatanatyam dancers dedicated to creating original, evening-length productions that blend classical and contemporary dance, with recent works including "Trishul: Dancing Trident" (2018), "Samsara: Dancing the Everyday" (2019), and "Radical Love: A Collective Movement" (2024). NATyA Dance also offers classes for children and adults. Academically, Dr. Radhakrishnan is the Marion Butler McLean Professor in the History of Ideas and Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College. Her scholarly work as an award-winning feminist sociologist, author, and researcher often intersects with her dance, exploring themes of gender and economic change.