MEERA CHAKRAVARTHY

Meera Chakravarthy is a cultural artist who blends the depth of arts research with the practice of energizing place. She is committed to fusing pockets of music and art throughout the world, identifying that mixing and blending cultures through art is how societies relate. As a child of Indian immigrants growing up in the suburbs of Kansas, her artistic influences were very disparate, ranging from Indian classical to western classical. Meera received her undergraduate degree in music under the great flutist Dr. Brooks de Wetter Smith, exploring ethnomusicology, specifically how the flute influenced spiritual music in multiple cultures beyond the western society. She also has a degree in economics and wrote her thesis on evaluating the outcomes of creative placemaking, a concept she has deeply been involved with as a practitioner and an academic.

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Meera is currently an artist in Washington, DC and hosts a variety of workshops and events that explore how artists' cultural identity relates to the work they produce. She is also a member of DC based world music bands ranging from West African to Indian music.  Meera is committed to bringing cross cultural diplomacy through the arts. This has led her to places like Mali, India, and Indonesia, where she has not only performed and learned from musicians, but engaged in conversations on using arts as a conduit for international development. In her world, real fulfillment is attained when she's at the intersection of creating art, conducting research, and activating the spaces and people around her.