Anooj Bhandari is a playwright, mover, and experimental/multidisciplinary performance and installation maker. He is currently an ensemble member of the New York Neo-Futurists, Fresh Lime Soda Productions (a contemporary South-Asian theater ensemble), and Agile Rascal Bicycle Touring Theater.
His play, The Dog is Alive at the Start of the Play, is a current finalist for the Carlo Annoni International Playwriting Prize on queer community and love, and his play, Chai Chai, is touring across the state of New Mexico on bikes and within public intergenerational spaces.
Bhandari is a teaching artist with the Moth and an experimental and devised performance instructor with the School of the New York Times. Also, a community organizer, he spends a lot of time thinking about how and why we gather, and what lives and thrives at the intersection of divination and abolition. Past residencies include the Asian American Arts Alliance and Museum of Contemporary African Diasporic Arts, and Brooklyn's BEAM Center.
While at MacDowell, Bhandari completed a draft of his first short film titled Blossoming Wasp, a transposition of previous audio and performance work centering the fig fruit and the art of counterfeit. In addition, he further developed the fables and mythology of a cast of puppets he started working with while touring his show Chai Chai. Finally, he completed a draft of a new play about two friends who are abducted by an alien spaceship run by a dog and an energy source who just cannot stop feeling, titled In Heat.
