Sahasra Sambamoorthi
Artistic Director

Sahasra Sambamoorthi is currently co-president at Navatman. She learned Bharatanatyam under Guru Smt Kalaimamani Ramya Ramnarayan and is the recipient of various awards including the NJSCA Folk Arts Apprenticeship. Following her graduation from Columbia University and learning much from the semi-classical troupe there Taal, she created Navatman Dance in an attempt to explore the boundaries of Bharatanatyam. Currently, she is learning Kathak from Ramya Agrawal and has taken continues to work in odissi with Bijayini Satpathy, Surupa Sen, and Pavitra Bhatt (Nrityagram) and Kuchipudi with Kishore Mosalikanti.

Maya Kumar

Maya Kumar’s love for dance started at a young age under the tutelage of Smt. Mrinalini Sadananda, director of the Kuchipudi dance school Kalamandapam in Washington, DC. She continued to develop as a dancer and teacher throughout college as part of the Virginia Tech garba team as well as the Indian classical fusion team. After moving to New York City to pursue her career in the fashion industry, Maya was also interested in further improving herself as a dancer. She has been a member of the Navatman Dance Company since 2013, and continues to learn everyday.

Aastha Joshi

Aastha’s love for dancing began at the young age of 5 when she started her formal training in classical dance  form of Bharatnatyam in India under Smt Heena Bhatt of Nalanda NrityakalaMahavidyalaya College of classical Indian dance. She grew up performing several Bharatnatyam recitals under the guidance of Smt Heena Bhatt as well as competing in several regional and nationaldance competitions in her school , undergrad and grad School. Aastha has performed and choreographed performances of Indian folk dances like Koli (Maharashtrian style), Rajasthani garba, raas and Bollywood styles in India. She has also experimented in Kathak, jazz and hip-hop with Bollywood Funk NYC, enabling her to explore various different styles of dance in accordance with her classical training. She  currently works in NYC as a Cardiac Rehab Specialist at Pulmonary Wellness & Rehabilitation Center. In an effort to continue to express her love and passion for dance, Aastha joined Navatman Dance Company in March 2014 and continues to push herself to learn  and experiment with this form of art.

Anuradha Sethuraman

From playing “mouse” in a nursery rhyme recital at the age of 3 to performing with Navatman Dance Company, dancing has been Anuradha’s greatest passion. She started formal training in the tanjore style of Bharatanatyam at the age of 13 under Smt Rajeshwari Natarajan from RajaRajeshwari Kala Mandir Mumbai. While obtaining her engineering degree from Delhi University and MBA from IIM Bangalore, she continued to choreograph and perform with the dance troupes at these schools in forms ranging from indian classical to Bollywood to bhangra, garba,and other indian folk dances, and won many interschool and intercollegiate competitions. When she moved to Hong Kong to work with Morgan Stanley as a trader, she began learning the benares gharana of Kathak under Smt Neesha Shah while parallelly pursuing her passion in Salsa dancing, and gave a number of performances at cultural events there. Her friends often joke that “ The first thing she does when moving to a new place, even before finding an apartment , is to look for a dance school”. Doing exactly that, when she moved to New York in 2013, she joined Navatman to continue learning Kathak under Sahasra Sambhamoorthi and went on to join Navatman’s inhouse Dance company and has been dancing with them for the past 1.5 years.

Jessica Perez
PAMP/PAEP Scholar in Marketing 

Jessica Perez studies bharatanatyam, kathak and carnatic vocal at Navatman and is training as a lyric soprano and a classical performer under Dr. Bethany Reeves. She has had experience from the young age of 17 in directing productions, notably The Lear Project with ASC under the expert mentorship of Dr. Bethany Reeves and Colette Rice, which was covered by The Jersey Journal and Destination Jersey City; under her belt is also a campus production of The Vagina Monologues, which boasted full houses for a 3 night run in a 300 seat venue. Though interested in directing, her true passion for theatre lies in acting in shows like ASC’s Arcadia (Thomasina), several Instant Shakespeare projects around NYC including Hamlet (Horatio) and The Tempest, and college shows, including Tartuffe (Dorine) Bat Boy (Maxine), among others. She hopes to complete her arangetrams in kathak, bharatanatyam and carnatic vocal soon. She studies political science, english, economics and theatre at Rutgers University.

Older members:
Many dancers have come to help bring the troupe to what it is today. We applaud those dancers who have created time in their busy schedules to manage this company!

Aanchal Raj, Sabina Sebastian, Usha Joyrama, Vidya Santosh, Priyanka Uchil, Taniya Panda, Natasha Raheja, Tanvi Bajaj, Aishwarya Iyer, Soumya Subramaniam, Kamya Somasundaram, Visali Ramanathan, Rohini Rau Murthy, Rohini Nair, Vani Nambudiri, Gayatri Mohan, Neha Deshmukh, Sahana Kamalakannan, Shalini Rajan, Jyotsna Kalyansundar, Bharathi Penneswaran, Samantha Lim

Dancer Bios