Asha Rowland
Asha Rowland is a Chicago-born, Minneapolis-based multidisciplinary artist working across dance, choreography, improvisation, vocal performance, and visual art. With over 20 years of dance experience, she draws from Bharatanatyam, Raqs Sharqi, Datura, and Street Dance to create a distinct, genre-defying movement language that is both fluid and precise, blending experimental movement with embodied storytelling. Asha is a Bharatanatyam disciple of Smt. Hema Rajagopalan and Smt. Krithika Rajagopalan of Natya Dance Theatre and has been mentored by Sabah Saeed, Tanji Harper, and Rachel Brice. Since 2014, she has taught and performed nationally and internationally as a solo artist and company dancer, appearing at venues including the Harris Theater, Millennium Park, MCA Chicago, Field Museum, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and Wortham Theater Center. Asha has worked with several choreographers including the Orchidaceae Dance Collective, Leila and Noelle Awadallah, Brenna Moser, and Alexandra Eady.
Asha’s work merges world-building, storytelling, and experimental movement, drawing on cultural intersections, ancestry, and trance. Her practice interrogates the systems and assumptions that shape how we understand ourselves and one another, exploring conformity, liberation, inherited knowledge, and the possibilities of imagining beyond perceived realities. Aesthetically, her work is narrative-driven, ethereal, often includes visual art, and straddles dualities of chaos and meditation. Her evening-length production, The Alchemist’s Soul, premiered in February 2025, featuring experimental Bharatanatyam with immersive, holographic-like projections. She also collaborates with Lakshmi Ramgopal’s Lykanthea as a dancer, choreographer, and vocalist. Their dance-theater production, Some Viscera, premiered at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2024.
Asha is a 2026 McKnight Dancer Fellow and recipient of the 2026 Minnesota State Arts Board Creative Individuals Grant. She is currently a resident visual artist in the Public Functionary Incubator Residency. Her past residencies and presentations include the 2022 Unrehearsed Cohort with Nava Dance Theatre, the Walker Art Center’s 2023 Choreographer’s Evening, the Cowles Center’s Generating Room, the Chrysalis Institute Milkweed Residency, Dance Barn Artist Residency, Black Ensemble Productions’ IFE Lab, the Center for Performing Arts Residency, and the Black Dance Improvisation Residency with Leslie Parker Dance Project. Asha is also a co-founder of Sawadvara, an artist-led collective dedicated to the ongoing motion of expanding educational opportunities and access for emerging artists.
