NITHYA IYER

Bio

Nithya Iyer is an interdisciplinary researcher of South Indian Tamil-descent. Raised in Melbourne, Australia, she currently resides in Lisbon, Portugal. Working across performance, photography, installation and writing, Nithya seeks to investigate how the body, and the body-in-motion, relates to notions of inheritance and territory. Her works combine research and form as a means to challenge the parameters of  conventional narratives, mediums and aesthetics. Trained for 15 years in the Indian dance forms of Bharatanatyam and Odissi at the Chandrabhanu Bharatalaya Academy of Dance, Australia, Nithya’s subsequent performance inquiries bring these choreographic aesthetics into dialogue with experimental and improvisational mediums. The capacity of the body as a repository of memory as well as an agent of metamorphoses, is a strong focus of her solo and collaborative practices. 

As a facilitator, Nithya develops and collaborates on pedagogical projects drawing from a methodology rooted in phenomenology as practiced in her Masters in Therapeutic Arts Practice and ongoing sessional facilitation at the Melbourne Institute of Experiential and Creative Art Therapy, Australia. This approach tends towards experiential and generative arts-based encounters tailored to the contexts of arts, academic, cultural and social institutions that seek alternative and experimental modes of praxis to complement or query existing curriculums. 

In 2020 she was the recipient of the Ian Potter Cultural Trust grant to undertake a one-year research project at the Hangar Centre for Artistic Investigation, Lisbon, and subsequently commissioned by the European Cooperation Funded 4C’s Project – From Conflict to Convivialiaty through Creativity and Culture in relation to a mediation project, ‘Notes from Atopia’. In 2021, she collaborated with Dr. Zohar Iancu (Catholic University of Portugal) to co-direct and facilitate a year-long residency space called the Daotown House of Alternative Research and Culture in Alentejo, Portugal.  Separately Nithya is a co-founder of The Third Thing with Vlad Mizikov (AUS/PT), undertaking performative research and writings on the capacity of feminist interventions in architectural sites. Her solo and collaborative work has been presented at festivals and institutions in Australia, India and Portugal, where she regularly presents and dialogues with artistic and cultural communities and institutions. 

Image taken by Noam Friedman

Contact: msnithyaiyer_at_gmail.com