Anooj wandered around taking long pauses //
In this space is everything you know as home, strains pulled from that feeling you get that makes your shoulders go down and funneled into your body. Your skin becomes thicker and lovelier and lovelier and lovelier and it starts to hug you and you see that all you need is already permeating between your body and the space between you and I. I want to ask you for a dance, I want to tell you to eat the rest of that, I want to sit by you as we whisper secrets, and I want you to imagine us getting to lay down under a warm blanket after a day that was so cold. I also want to punch things, gnaw at them, bleed a little, and tell them that we refuse to forget. And when we are done, I want us to breathe, to become even lovelier than the loveliest, and tell the tale while leaving out all the words.
// until he found himself here.
Anooj is a Community Organizer with passions for the relationship between community education and the transformation of harm, and exploring alternatives to, diversions from, and the elimination of, the carceral state. His work focuses on building microcosms that imagine and explore the possibility of liberation within the interpersonal, through facilitations and community experiences. Recent campaign work includes the fight to end the School-to-Prison-Pipeline and the implementation of Restorative Justice in communities. Anooj was a co-organizer of the On Our Terms project (www.onourterms.nyc) and currently coordinates community training, public programming, and youth organizing, at New York City’s Restorative Justice Initiative.
Anooj is an Artist, specifically a creative storyteller, experimental theater maker, performer, and installation creator, who believes deeply in art as a process to ask quiet questions publicly. He is an ensemble member of the New York Neo-Futurists, where he writes, performs, and directs in their weekly show, The Infinite Wrench. He also collaborates with Fresh Lime Soda Productions, a contemporary South-Asian theater ensemble, and is a writer and performer with Agile Rascal, a bicycle touring theater troupe. He is an alumnus of EmergeNYC, the Hemispheric Institute’s Fellowship for Emerging Political Performance Artists. Past residencies have included the Lighthouse Residency at the BEAM Center, The Dancing with Peace Residency at How to Build Up, Inc. where he also served as the Residency Coordinator, and The Bandung Residency with the Asian American Arts Alliance and the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporic Arts. Anooj is a 2023 MacDowell Fellowship recipient in the Theater Arts.
Photo Credit: Pato Hebert