Arsita Iswardhani

Born in 1986 in Yogyakarta/Indonesia, where she currently resides.

Arsita Iswardhani obtained a Bachelor of Arts in Communication Studies from the Department of Social Politics at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta in 2012. She is an actor, performance-maker, and dramatist. She has been a collective member and a program organizer at Teater Garasi/Garasi Performance Institute since 2012. Interested in intercultural and interdisciplinary approaches, she is currently exploring the themes of precarity, invisible labor and the production of excess and residues as seen from her location in the Global South. Her biographical work Shatters and Panties Herstory (Yogyakarta, 2022) is her latest foray in this direction.

This trajectory evolves further through her projects undertaken with the collective, the latest of which constitutes an inter-Asian collaborative theater, Multitude of Peer Gynts (2018–2021), exploring »fear/anxiety« and »im/mobility« in contemporary Asia. She presented a four-hour micro-dance, How the Ghost Worker is Dancing in Your Shoes (2020) as a part of UrFear: Huhu and the Multitude of Peer Gynts in 2021. Multitude of Peer Gynts was a winner of the Ibsen Scholarship Award in 2019.

A facilitator of the Asian Performing Arts Farm (APAF) 2020 Laboratory, she also served as a dramatist with UrFear: Transit Sri Lanka and Vietnam (2021) and the OpenLab program (2021/2022) and Invisible Dance Program (2022/2023).