Mayuri Bhandari

Mayuri Bhandari is a South Asian American movement artist who works across dance, figure skating, yoga studies, performance, and cultural critique. She holds a B.A. in Dance and South Asian Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and an M.A. in Yoga Studies from Loyola Marymount University, where she now serves as a Dance lecturer. Her practice refuses to separate virtuosity from the cultural and political contexts in which movement lives.

Bhandari's early work reached broad audiences through television. In 2011, she became a finalist on the Indian dance-reality program *Just Dance*. In 2014, she participated in the Life OK series *Dare 2 Dance*. During these years, she co-founded and served as creative director for BollyX, a Bollywood-inspired dance-fitness company that drew together Indian classical and folk forms, contemporary dance, Afro-Brazilian movement, salsa, and hip-hop into group-fitness classes. At Berkeley, her 2012 Stronach Baccalaureate Prize recognized *A Language Without Words*, a project proposing movement-based communication for blind and deaf children in rural Maharashtra, India—an early signal of her commitment to dance as access and connection rather than spectacle alone.

Bhandari's graduate research at LMU centered on rasa, the Indian aesthetic theory of emotional and sensory flavor, as a resource for modern performance. This scholarly framework has deepened her stage work. Her 2020 lecture on rasa in Indian dance, delivered through LMU's Yoga Studies program, documents her thinking on how classical aesthetics speak to contemporary embodied practice. In 2025, she collaborated on LMU's *HeartBeat* project, dancing in live response to a changing heartbeat rhythm—a piece that translates her interest in embodiment and responsiveness into literal technological exchange.

In 2024, Bhandari premiered *The Anti "Yogi"* at Hollywood Fringe, a one-person dance-and-physical-theatre work created and performed by her in collaboration with director D'Lo, choreographer-dramaturg Shyamala Moorty, and live percussionist Neel Agrawal. Using dance, dramedy, poetry, and percussion, the piece interrogates the commodification and cultural appropriation of yoga in the West. It received Hollywood Fringe recognition for Dance and Physical Theatre and the Zephyr's Zest Award, and traveled to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2025. This work exemplifies Bhandari's signature approach: moving fluidly among vocabularies—Indian gesture, contemporary floor work, spoken comedy, character transformation—while using physical form as evidence in an argument about identity, labor, and spiritual practice.