Swati Arora

Swati Arora is an academic and writer based in London/United Kingdom.

Her work engages with minoritarian performance and visual culture, feminist theory, and postcolonial geographies.

She holds an Erasmus Mundus Masters in International Performance Research from the University of Amsterdam/Netherlands and the University of Warwick/UK and completed her PhD at the University of Exeter/UK on UK-India Education and Research Initiative funding. Currently appointed as Senior Lecturer in Performance and Global South Studies at Queen Mary University of London, she has held Andrew W. Mellon Fellowships at the Centre for Humanities Research and the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, UWC, South Africa.

Arora is a recipient of the Early Career Researcher Prize 2024, awarded by the Theatre and Performance Research Association, UK.

Drawing on performance studies, art history, feminist theory, and critical postcolonial urbanisms, she is working on her first monograph which looks at the relationship between performance practices and the street space in Delhi/India. The research explores how these aesthetic practices emerge from, and respond to, the densely entangled processes of urbanisation, climate crises, and sociopolitical environment, while navigating the dynamics of class, caste, gender, sexuality, and communal politics.