Anooj Bhandari

Anooj Bhandari is a Community Organizer with passions for the relationship between community education and harm reduction practice, and exploring alternatives to, diversions from, and the elimination of, the carceral state. His work focuses on building microcosms that imagine and explore the possibility of liberation within the interpersonal. He is the Deputy Director of Community Practice at NYC's Restorative Justice Initiative, particularly invested in developing restorative practices on a community and neighborhood level.

Anooj is an Artist, creating experimental performance and theater, and believing deeply in art as a process to ask quiet questions publicly, quite like restorative circle. He is an ensemble member of the New York Neo-Futurists, where he writes, performs, and directs in their weekly show, The Infinite Wrench. He is an alumnus of EmergeNYC, the Hemispheric Institute’s Fellowship for Emerging Political Performance Artists, the Lighthouse Residency at the BEAM Center, and The Bandung Residency with the Asian American Arts Alliance and the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporic Arts.

Anooj is a 2023 MacDowell Fellowship recipient in the Theater Arts and a part of the Arts Faculty at Marymount Manhattan College. He is a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow for the Theater Arts.

What drew you to the MA Arts Politics program?

The program seemed simultaneously so broad and so niche. The merging of Arts and Politics post-program seems nothing but intimate and obvious but in applying to the program, I knew I loved theatre and dance and that my priorities were in youth development and social justice education and I thought this program would let me expand into those specifications without reducing me being to only those things. 

How do you describe or identify your practice/ work?

I would describe my practice as world creating, space making, and interdependence building through a merging of social justice education/community organizing practice and performance art. I'm specifically interested in creating and devising performance work that centers the body as a container of all that is home as well as merging the arts with educational pedagogy.

How did your experience in the program shape your work? 

My experiences in the program completely reshaped my work, my craft, and my foundations of work because the program, in short, pushed me to analyze and rebuild what those things were. I remember during our course in Puerto Rico we visited Daniel Lind Ramos and it was the perfect bridge between my two semesters, giving me a chance to see art work that manifested the sensory experiences of home in ethnographic, resistance work, and that experience rerouted my experiences as a creator and maker all throughout the second semester.  Alongside this, I have a newfound love for curatorial practice and being able to seek connections in my surroundings to bring together with the ethical questions that come with being an artist.