Hrishikesh Pawar

Hrishikesh Vithal Pawar (born 1983) is an Indian Kathak and contemporary dancer, choreographer and dance educator based in Pune. He is the founder and artistic director of the Centre of Contemporary Dance, Pune, and of the Prayatna Film and Dance Festival. His practice combines Kathak and contemporary dance and includes long-term community work with people living with Parkinson's disease, through free classes run by his Avartan Dance Foundation that were among the first programmes of their kind in India. In 2024 he was a Berlin Fellow in the performing arts at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, and continued his Kathak training under Neelima Adhye.

In 2004 Pawar took part in a summer improvisation workshop in Berlin and performed as a soloist at German venues including the Seebühne on the island of Hiddensee. He returned to India in 2007 after a period of teaching and performing in Dresden. its sixteenth edition was held in April 2025.

In 2014 Pawar collaborated with the Chicago company Clinard Dance Theater, led by Wendy Clinard, setting a work on the company as part of an India–Chicago exchange supported by a grant to Clinard Dance from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's International Connections Fund; Clinard travelled to Pune in 2015 as part of the same exchange.

In December 2023 Pawar curated and performed as lead dancer in In C in Pune, a staging of the Sasha Waltz & Guests work In C presented with the Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Pune at The Box, Pune; the cast combined professional dancers of his company with schoolchildren and members of his Dance for Parkinson's group.

Dancers of Pawar's company collaborated on the artist Tejal Shah's Landfill Dance, a channel of her five-channel video installation Between the Waves, which premiered at dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel in 2012. In 2018–19 Pawar performed in Thought is also a Matter, a collateral exhibition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale curated by Raju Sutar in Fort Kochi. His collaborative work has also been presented at the Fringe Festival in Canada. and has lectured at the Inter-University Centre for Dance (HZT) in Berlin. He has also taught at the Film and Television Institute of India. and Mallika Sarabhai's The Conference of the Birds (2023) for the Darpana Academy of Performing Arts in Ahmedabad. He has also worked in film as a performer and choreographer, He began classes in Pune in 2009,

In 2024 he received the Berlin Fellowship of the JUNGE AKADEMIE at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, in the performing arts section, with a residency project on the role of memory in contemporary dance. In 2026 his work was included in Vessel & Voyager, an exhibition of the JUNGE AKADEMIE fellows at the Akademie der Künste (13 March – 10 May 2026).