ANJNA SWAMINATHAN (they/them) is a queer multidisciplinary composer, musician, and theatre artist. Their work exists at the nexus of multiple creative disciplines, simultaneously leaning into the rigor available within each form while seeking release from form entirely. As an artist with a passion for social justice, community building, and critical consciousness, Anjna’s artistic practice is an extension of their activist spirit. Their work emerges from their identity as a nonbinary, queer, disabled, autistic, neurodivergent, South Indian person. Anjna uses musical expression, visual art, poetry, and storytelling to forge connections across cultural, economic, gendered, racial, and sexual identities and communities.

Anjna is a disciple of the late violin maestro Parur Sri M.S. Gopalakrishnan and Mysore Sri H.K. Narasimhamurthy. In 2015, Anjna came under the tutelage of vocalist Samarth Nagarkar for training in Hindustani music and accompaniment. Informed by rigorous training in the art music traditions of India, Anjna incorporates and expands this vocabulary in their compositional and improvisatory work. Anjna was a 2018 Composer Fellow at the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music, where they developed their skills in notated music and composition under the guidance of composer-mentor Gabriela Lena Frank. Since then, Anjna has created a robust lexicon for communicating Indian classical ornamentation to western classical string musicians through a combination of oral tradition and notation. They employ this lexicon in addition to graphic scores, paintings, text scores, and mindfulness to bring their ideas to life in music.

Their musical voice transcend genre, melding their rootedness in Carnatic and Hindustani music with western classical notation, and countless years spent collaborating with and learning alongside musicians in the creative music, jazz, maqam, experimental, electronic, and independent music scenes.

Anjna envisions art as an extension of our deepest spiritual, political. and personal questions. Their work emerges from their intimate relationship with the violin and engages performers in deepening their technical and emotional vulnerability. Anjna’s creative process is multidisciplinary, dynamic, loving, and expansive. Anjna offers decades of mastery and a loving spirit, collaborating as a friend, mentor, and visionary with those in their orbit.

Outside of their musical endeavors, Anjna is a writer, model, actor, content creator, designer, and the co-founder of SA Creative Playscape, a creative studio and consultancy led by Anjna and their beloved wife, Shannon Swaminathan-Roper.