Nandini Sikand

Nandini Sikand is an Indian-American filmmaker, anthropologist, and classical Odissi dancer. She is a Professor of Film and Media Studies at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. Sikand is known for her work in documentary cinema focusing on issues of women's rights, the prison industrial complex, and diasporic identity, as well as her academic writing on Indian dance traditions. She was a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow in Film and Video.

Biography Sikand was born and raised in New Delhi, India. She attended St. Stephen's College, Delhi, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy. She later moved to the United States, earning a Master of Arts in Communications from Northern Illinois University and a Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology from the CUNY Graduate Center.

Sikand's work as a filmmaker spans over two decades, primarily in documentary and experimental formats. In an article from The Massachusetts Review about the sociopolitical landscape surrounding South Asian American culture, Ketu H. Katrak noted that Sikand's video The Bhangra Wrap illustrates that bhangra extends beyond its nature as a performance art by acting as a "struggle over the definition of authenticity, tradition, cultural values, and above all, sexual mores". One of her short films, Amazonia (2001), was a video poem which centered on breast cancer and juxtaposes electronic sounds with images of medical scenes, city views, and others; Sally Walters called Sikand's vision for the film "one of defiance and non-capitulation".

Some of Sikand's films are longer than twenty minutes, including Don’t Fence Me In (1998), a feature documentary centered on her mother Krishna Sikand, and Soma Girls (2009), centered on the lives of girls born to sex workers and raised in a Kolkata hostel. In 2018, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Film and Video. Her 2019 feature documentary, Inside/Outside, focuses on incarcerated women reentering society in the Lehigh Valley. Her choreographic work often combines film imagery with live performance. In 2013, she served as the choreographer for an opera based on the life of Phoolan Devi, blending Odissi vocabulary with operatic storytelling.

Sikand is a Professor of Film and Media Studies at Lafayette College. Her academic fields include race, gender, documentary, and the prison industrial complex.

Sikand has received grants from the Center for Asian American Media, The Jerome Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts.

Selected works Filmography The Bhangra Wrap (1995) Don't Fence Me In (1998) Amazonia (2001) Mahasweta Devi (2001) In Whose Name? (2004) Soma Girls (2009) Cranes of Hope (2011) Slightest Shifts (2012) One, if by Land (2015) Inside/Outside (2019)

Books