Umeshi Rajeendra
Umeshi Rajeedra is a Sri Lankan-based choreographer, dancer, dance educator and movement coach for theatre. She is the Founder and Artistic Director of Mesh Academy of Dance and Mesh Dance Theatre, as well as a Dance Lecturer at the University of Visual and Performing Arts and the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka. Having made her dancing debut at the age of six, Umeshi received her Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Dance and Economics with a minor in Political Science, specifically focusing on choreography, from Denison University in Ohio, USA.
Umeshi has performed and worked with reputable artists such as South African artist Dada Masilo, Bukina Faso artist Olivier Tarpaga, US artists Sandra Mathern-Smith. Upon moving home to Sri Lanka, she has continued to perform, choreograph, and teach, traveling across South Asia, traversing between and among multiple territories as an embodied exchange.
A recent receipt of the 2020 President's Fund for Excellence at the University of the Arts, Umeshi’s creative practice deals with relationality and geography, in-between and among identities, and decolonial modes of engagement from a subaltern perspective, believing in the transformational power of performance. Her movement practice and thinking is in a place of in-between, how different knowledges come into contact with one another physically and mentally, existing in the cracks of a block of traditional and movement forms, such as contemporary dance, traditional kandyan and bharatanatyam, jazz, "asian" diaspora, and hip hop from a south asian perspective.