Young Artists Takeover + Roundtable

Vidya Patel is a Birmingham based dance artist, choreographer and performer. With foundations of Indian classical dance training, her curiosity led artistic practice strives to extend past society’s boxed expectations, leading her into new spaces, experiences, forms and collaborations. Since graduating from CAT South Asian Strand, at DanceXchange, Vidya represented the South Asian Category in the Grand Finals of the inaugural BBC Young Dancer 2015 at Sadler’s Wells where she is currently a Young Associate choreographer til 2022.

Vidya has been choreographing new works on a range of dancers, recently working with third years of Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance, which premiered at Royal Opera House, Sadlers Wells and with Joss Arnott’s Emergence Company touring in the UK 2022.  During the pandemic, she has developed a community network, “South Asian Dance Artists UK” and is also a Creative Mentor for One Dance UK’s Young Creative programme. She also serves on several boards and panels, and is on the panel for Artcry, funding for political/ social art for the public.

Vidya continues to develop her curiosity led practice and continues to collaborate with artists across arts, with the hope of encouraging exposure of underrepresented stories.

Sanam Sheriff is a queer poet and artist from Bangalore, India. They have received support from the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, The Watering Hole, Pink Door, The Seventh Wave, and are a Pushcart Prize Nominee. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Indiana Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Academy of American Poets, The Offing, Vinyl Poetry & Prose,  Black Warrior Review, Kweli Journal, Shade Literary Arts, DW B, and elsewhere. Sanam holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Washington University in St. Louis. She currently resides in Philadelphia, PA, and is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Bryn Mawr College. Sanam is working, with much love, on her debut poetry collection.

Shailee Mehta (Born 1998, Indore, India) is an artist, primarily working with painting and drawing, who is interested in rendering the feminine with an autobiographical approach to the politics of otherness, mythology and desire. She works extensively with elements of figuration and embodiment and situates the female body as a central agential motif in her explorations of visibility. Using tools of storytelling within the liminal spaces of the urban and the wild, her feminized gaze desexualises the body while foregrounding its vulnerability.

She completed her BFA in 2020 at The Slade School of Fine Art. Her most recent solo show was ‘In The Belly of A Slovenly Crow’, The Residence Gallery (London, 2020). She has been part of various group shows including ‘Slow Burn’ at Indigo+Madder (London, 2021), ‘Run With The Wolves’, Lawrie-Shabibi (Dubai, 2021), ‘Les Danses Nocturnes’ (France, 2021) with East Contemporary, ‘A Small Dent in the Air’, Grove Collective (London, 2021) and ‘All Is Not Lost 20:20:20’, Sakshi Gallery (Mumbai, 2020). She lives and works in Mumbai, India.