Founder

An Indian-American and hard-of-hearing choreographer, filmmaker, poet, educator, and Performance Studies scholar, the Founding Director of Folded Paper Dance and Theatre Limited (Hong Kong; Seattle; India), Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren is launching Wild Studios Consulting & Creative Productions, committed to the development of new transdisciplinary practices for our shared futures.

She has authored numerous works on performance, disability, ecology, and heritage; produced conferences, symposia, interactive installations, and community events; taught a wide range of Interdisciplinary Studies courses and facilitated workshops and professional development training programmes; and created, choreographed, and directed more than 100 performances in the US, Europe, and Asia.

Her methodology, a combination of ethnography, experimental writing, dance arts, and design practices, critical theory, and storytelling, focuses on how the multisensory can inform a future-looking approach to accessible cultural heritage practices and arts for all through both live and virtual platforms as it expands our capacities to listen to each other and to the earth.

She has received numerous awards, including a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Scholar Award (Kerala, India: 2022-2023; Kerala, India: 2017-2018); Hong Kong Arts Development Council Project Grant (2021); Design Trust (Hong Kong: 2022; 2016-2017); Barbican Art School Lab Fellowship (London: 2012); Co-editor/Editor of Theatre Topics (2007-2011); NEH Summer Institute (Disability Studies, 2000); DAAD Award (Disability and the Legacy of Eugenics, 2004); and Artistic Residencies in Middle Tennessee State University (2012); Orissa, India (2011); and Turin, Italy (2010).

She is the author of Hearing Difference: The Third Ear in Experimental, Deaf, and Multicultural Theatre; the lead-editor of The Exquisite Corpse: Chance and Collaboration in Surrealism’s Parlor Game; and former editor of Theatre Topics. Her current writing projects include Theatre and Disability in India (under contract with Routledge); Traveling Exchanges; Ensembles of Innovation; and “The Komagata Maru Incident: Afro-Asian Futurisms.”

With a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from NYU, Kochhar-Lindgren earned her MFA in Dance from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro; her Certificate in Movement Analysis from the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies in New York; an MALS from Wesleyan University (CT); and an undergraduate degree in psychology from Antioch College (Yellow Springs).

Before moving in other directions, she was tenured as Associate Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington: Bothell, where she served as both the Co-Director of the Cultural Studies Collective and the Director of the Chancellor’s 2013 Innovation Forum.

Founder

Gray Kochhar-Lindgren is an Honorary Professor in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong, where he served between 2014-2022 as Professor & Director of the Common Core (HKU Common Core Curriculum). Prior to joining HKU, he served as Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, the inaugural Director of the First Year and Pre-Major Programmes, and the inaugural Associate Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate Learning at the University of Washington-Bothell (just outside of Seattle).

Gray, who was a Fulbright Scholar in Hong Kong in 2009-10, is a Principal Fellow for AdvanceHE, a Fellow of the Hong Kong Teaching Excellence Alliance (HKTEA), and an Advisory Board member for different international organizations. Gray served as the Lead for Transdisciplinarity-in-Action, which won the Outstanding Teaching Award (Team) from both HKU and the University Grants Committee (UGC).

Recent publications include Pintxos: Small Delicacies and Chance Encounters (forthcoming); Urban Arabesques: Philosophy, Hong Kong, Transversality; “Scintillant@the University of Angelic Invention,” “I Hate Philosophy,” and “Wild Studios: Art, Philosophy, and the Transversal University” (with Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren). Currently, he is working on The Event of Noir: Metaphysics and the Detectives and GeoLyricisms: The Idiolects of Stone.