Aishwarya Kumar is a PhD candidate in Culture Studies at Universidade Católica Portuguesa and an FCT scholarship holder. Trained in Bharatnatyam, Information Arts (India), and Media/Performance theory (Netherlands), she is an FCT scholar and PhD candidate at Universidade Católica Portuguesa researching 21st-century diasporic curiosity.
Since 2016, Kumar’s practice examines systems and aesthetics through performance, with fieldwork across South Asia, Northern and Southern Europe. Founder of Stage Rabbit studio – producing artists from Portugal, India, Belgium, Spain – she curated Down The Rabbit Hole pavilion for The Wrong Biennale (Nov 2025-Mar 2026). Kumar is the Artistic Director of Sobremesa: Vagaries of Palate, a Creative Europe small-scale cooperation project (Feb 2026-May 2027). Leading the consortium across Italy, Portugal, Basque region of Spain, and Greece, the pilot confronts nation-state identities through food practices via co-curatorial research, transnational residencies, and transdisciplinary dissemination against gastronationalism. Her recent work has been disseminated through Junctions Journal (2021), Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2023), Contemporanea (2024), Arte Capital (2024), Culture Moves Europe grant (Poland 2025), assistant curator A Study in Isolation, Universe Pavilion (Venice Biennale 2025).