Aishwarya Kumar is an interdisciplinary cultural researcher and artistic director whose work explores embodied curiosity, perception, and transnational cultural systems. Combining performance, artistic research, and curatorial practice, she investigates how bodily experience and spatial environments shape cognition, identity, and collective memory. Her practice spans South Asia and Europe through performance, film, somatic methodologies, and transnational cultural collaborations. She is a PhD candidate in Culture Studies at Universidade Católica Portuguesa, an FCT scholarship holder, and a Europaeum Scholar (2026–2027).

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Since 2016, Kumar's practice examines systems and aesthetics that are organised through diaspora communities, with fieldwork across South Asia, Northern and Southern Europe. Her research intersects corporeality and cognition, creates immersive performance environments that alter audience perception through embodied endurance practices (dance, somatics, deep sea diving). Founder of Stage Rabbit studio - producing artists from Portugal, India, Belgium, Spain - she curated Down The Rabbit Hole pavilion for The Wrong Biennale (Nov 2025-Mar 2026).

Aishwarya Kumar is currently the Artistic Director of Sobremesa: Vagaries of Palate, a Creative Europe small-scale cooperation project (Feb 2026-May 2027). Leading a four-country Creative Europe consortium across Portugal, Italy, Greece, and the Basque region, the pilot confronts nation-state identities through food practices via co-curatorial research, transnational residencies, exploring how food shapes national identity. Her recent work has been disseminated through Junctions Journal (2021), Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2023), Contemporanea (2024), Arte Capital (2024), Culture Moves Europe grant (Poland 2025), A Study in Isolation, Universe Pavilion (Venice Biennale 2025), and Sobremesa (2026-2027).