Gayatri (they/them) practices dance as a healing ritual with the aim of articulating caste as an embodied experience intertwined with gender and land relationship. They dance, write, research, and facilitate workshops on the topic of dance as a site of embodied environmental relationship and the possibilities for generating reparative and life-affirming movement patterns. 

Gaya graduated with their Masters in Environmental Justice from the University of Michigan. Their thesis Ruptured Membranes: Brahmanical Bharatanatyam as a Site of Embodied Environmental Casteism combines political ecology, dance studies, Black and Indigenous feminist geographies, and movement research. Their thesis process included facilitating three workshops at Resource Mpls to collaboratively research the relationships between dance and purity politics. 

In March 2025, Gaya offered a ten-minute solo performance for Red Eye Theatre’s Tiger Balm Festival (March 2025) titled “ruptured membranes”. In May 2025, they offered a thirty-minute multidisciplinary performance at the Riverside Arts Center in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Gaya was selected as Artist-in-Residence by Rosy Simas Danse for a two-week residency in May 2025. Continuing their residency investigations, Gaya facilitated a series of workshops at Resource Mpls that explored dance as a practice of environmental justice. Gaya is currently working on disability justice praxis in their dance practice in collaboration with Barak adé Soleil and Jasmine Gill. They are also working with Sayge Carroll to create ceramic altar pieces for their performances. 

Gaya participated in Springboard for the Arts’ artist cohort Weathering Together in 2025, and created a zine of environmental justice dance scores. Gaya was part of Hope Community’s TRCSTR program and the Marcel Experimental Forest’s Artist-in-Residency program in 2022. They have performed in works by Leila Awadallah, Valerie Oliveiro, Chitra Vairavan, Sequoia Hauck and Pramila Vasudevan. Gaya apprenticed with Ananya Dance Theater in 2019-2020. Their dance training began in 2006 with Chitra Chandrasekhar Dasarathy in Bangalore, India.