Samita Sinha is a vocal artist, composer, and cultural worker. She combines tradition with experiment to create new forms, drawing from a deep grounding in North Indian classical music, a contemporary vocabulary, folk and ritual music, and songs and texts in several languages. She blends a raw, visceral energy with her classical training, creating a dynamic range of focused solo work and adventurous collaborations with jazz musicians and improvisers (Marc Cary, Sunny Jain), poets (Fiona Templeton, Sekou Sundiata), and dancers (Daria Fain). Sinha is also an innovative arts educator in schools and communities through MAPP, Carnegie Hall, and the 92nd Street Y. She has received awards from NYSCA, Fulbright Foundation, Queens Council on the Arts, Asian American Arts Alliance, and has been awarded residencies at Millay Colony, The Coleman Center (Alabama), and KHN (Nebraska). She studied Post-Colonial Literature and Cultural Criticism at Yale, and received her MFA from Bard in 2010.
Sinha will distill and clarify the practice that has created Cipher — the particular fusion of sound, song, body, space, story, visuals, and cultures. This will include an investigation of body (seated and standing, still and moving) in relation to space (inner, and external), audience, and machines/ objects. Study of Wilson’s work will be an essential component of this investigation. As Cipher is developed, so will the vision of the next work, which has begun as a duo collaboration with another vocal artist (Julia Ulehla, trained in opera and at the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards), along with visual/ video artist Dani Leventhal.