Graduate Student
Afreen Sen Chatterji (she/her/hers) is a Ph.D. Candidate with the Department of Theater and Dance at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She completed her M.A. in Theatre and Performance Studies from King’s College London (2018) and her B.A. in English Literature from Delhi University (2017).
Previously a ballet teacher and theater practitioner, Afreen’s interest in performance narratives as shaped by structures of power have brought her to Santa Barbara from New Delhi. Her research focuses on the relationship between bodies and the intersecting politics of caste, gender, and class in the context of modern dance in India. Afreen’s dissertation is being supported by the Graduate Division Dissertation Fellowship (2025). She has also received the Regents in Theater and Dance award (2021).
Afreen’s article, “Uday Shankar and the Textures of Intercultural Exchange” has been published in Border Crossings: Exile and American Modern Dance (1900-1955), edited by Ninotchka Bennahum and Rena Heinrich (2023). In this article, she maps Uday Shankar’s translocational intermingling to understand the intercultural transactions that shaped his creative formulations, as well as his cultivation of a modern Indian movement vocabulary.
In addition to her research in dance, Afreen’s article, “Hamlet in Kashmir, Hamlet as Kashmir: The Politics of Place in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider (2014)” appears in The Shakespearean International Yearbook: Reparative Shakespeare, edited by Alexa Alice Joubin and Natalia Khomenko (2025). Here, she delves into film analysis to examine the political, aesthetic, and affective consequences of relocating the Shakespearean tragedy to Kashmir of the 1990s.
Committed to staying in touch with her theater practice, Afreen has co-organized an evening of Graduate-Directed One Acts in which she directed Degas C’est Moi by David Ives (Spring 2025). She has also taught performance and production-based classes at UCSB.