Anooj Bhandari, 2017
Anooj is a community organizer and multi-disciplinary performance artist, combining curiosity around spaces of transition, waiting, conflict, contest, and unknown, with histories of community organizing and movement building in an attempt to decolonize and reconstruct concepts of dignity and love. Anooj is an abolitionist who believes that friendship is the playground for understanding, embodying, and manifesting surveillance-free space, and uses his playwriting practice to uplift narratives that reveal the wonder of holding lonely questions within companionship. Within his live performance practice, Anooj likes to contend with what it means to have a body through poetics, body-horror/body-nonsense, and movement. His current campaign work focuses on manifesting schools and libraries as public spaces of trust and interdependence. Anooj is an ensemble member of the New York Neo-Futurists.