School of Social Sciences

Shabari Rao is an artist and educator from Bangalore, India. Her work engages with interdisciplinary research on embodiment. As an artist, she performs, directs, curates, teaches, and writes. Over the past 20 years, her work has been supported and presented at conferences, festivals, residencies, and in publications in cities as diverse as Shanghai, London, New York, Vienna, Oslo, Cape Town, and Melbourne, among others. Shabari has held several academic positions where she designs and delivers interdisciplinary courses in higher education settings. Most recently, she was an Adjunct Assistant Professor at BITS School of Law and a Visiting Faculty at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Previously, she was a founding faculty member at RV University, where she headed the Performing Arts programme in the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences. She has completed her PhD at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, where her research focuses on Embodied Pedagogy in Mathematics Teaching. She has presented her doctoral research at international STEM and Mathematics Education conferences, where her contributions have been very well received. She also holds an MA (with distinction) in Arts and Education from the Royal Academy of Dance (UK), a professional diploma in Contemporary Dance Studies from the Trinity Laban Conservatoire (UK), and a BA in Kathak and Choreography from Bangalore University.