B.A. (Honors) in Music, University of Cambridge; M.St. in Musicology, University of Oxford
Leia Devadason is a writer, composer, and Odissi dance-learner from Singapore. Her dissertation focuses on what she calls "counterclassical" Indian dance, an emerging transnational genre which has bloomed in an intimate, antagonistic, and mutually constitutive relation to globally renowned genres of "classical" dance. Using rasa and Frankfurt School aesthetics, postcolonial poetics of Relation, and queer/sexuality studies as frameworks of inquiry, Leia's work mobilises a range of fields to affirm the importance of the body, bodily labour, and bodily aesthetics in these times. Leia's writing has been published by South Asian Dance Intersections, Oxford Public Philosophy, and Ethos Books. Most recently, she was awarded the Bay Area-based Unrehearsed Artist Residency and the Voices of Bhakti Fellowship, opportunities which allowed her to engage themes of body politics and mixed genealogies further in video art.