Anila Kumari is an acclaimed dancer, scholar, and educator. Anila Kumari belongs to the artistic lineage and tradition of her mother and teacher, Nilimma Devi – and through her  illustrious Kuchipudi gurus – Prahlad Vedantam Sarma, Jaganath Vedantam Sarma and Dr. Nataraja Ramakrishna. Hailed by the Washington Post as “A feast for the eyes. With intricate hand movements, she wove a fantasy fabric of invisible threads across the stage,” Anila has performed on stages in Hyderabad, New Delhi in India, Nairobi Kenya and Iran. 

Born in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1969, Kumari began learning dance as soon as she learned to walk. Travelling with her mother Nilimma Devi, she quickly began performing and teaching, adding new choreographic flair and ambition to repertoire they created together, such as ‘Saraswati Vandana’ and ‘Walk the Sky’. She studied Cultural Anthropology at the University of Maryland, publishing a thesis on dance and culture within multiracial immigrant communities, and researched hasta mudra (hand gesture) signifiers and innovation alongside Nilimma Devi on an AIIS fellowship. She has been teaching at Sutradhar since its founding in 1988, and innovated numerous courses such as the Lotus Buds program, Visual Art and Storytelling, Creative Writing, Abhinaya tutorials, and more. An accomplished dramatist and storyteller, she translates Sanskrit poetry into English while preserving its lyricism, allowing Indian Classical Dance to be accessible to a wider English-speaking audience. 

She studied abhinaya technique with Priyadarshini Govind and Padmabhushan Kalanidhi Narayanan, and has honed interpretive expression that seeks to empower people and heal internal sense of patriarchal division. Always seeking a way to convey the essence of dance as a language of the soul, she innovated a creative writing class for children struggling with anxiety and other mental health issues, and in 1989 helped develop a mindfulness dance program for inner-city youth through the Davis Dance Studio, D.C..

Anila’s vision unites disparate threads of ancient wisdom from stories that tap into the reservoir of soul as power .  She reimagines myths not only to access her own multiple adaptations in a lifetime moving from country to country, but to seek a cross-cultural connectivity in language, visual arts and music that serves today’s generation. Whether it is seeing the underlying unity of a Sufi poem and Satyabhama or teaching second generation immigrants the importance of a living tradition, Anila sees creative work as an interconnected network of progress.