Rathna Kumar started her dance journey as a 4 year old, and her professional career as a performing solo dancer began at the young age of 9. She has performed all over the world at prestigious events and festivals, and venues such as the Téatre des Champs Elysée, Paris, France. She settled down in Houston, Texas, in 1975, where she established Texas’ first Indian dance institute, ANJALI Center for Performing Arts, also one of the first in North America. Rathna is a reputed performer, choreographer, teacher, arts educator, and cultural ambassador. She is also a scholar, linguist, singer, public speaker and a published author, and has specialized in two classical dance forms, Bharatanatyam and Kuchipudi, which she studied under renowned Gurus K.J. Sarasa and Vempati Chinna Satyam respectively. She has also studied Abhinaya under Mylapore Gowri Ammal and Kalanidhi Narayanan.
Immensely successful in the US as an artist, Rathna continues to perform and receive numerous awards in India as well, in recognition of her ongoing efforts to promote Indian classical dance in her current homeland, USA. Most significantly, the Government of India conferred upon her, one of only two Indian Americans in history, the most prestigious Sangeet Natak Akademi Award for Excellence in Performing Arts (Kuchipudi Dance), for her prodigious contribution to the preservation, promotion and propagation of the traditional arts of India. She is a recipient of several Individual Artist Grants for Choreography from the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance, and a Groundwork Grant from Dance Source Houston. In 2022 the Young Audiences of Houston, in recognition of her long service to the organization, gave her an arts-in-Education Tenured Teaching Artist Award, and in January 2023 she was named Artist of the Year 2023 by Dance Source Houston.
Rathna has trained over 3000 students from around the country, choreographed 36 productions and hundreds of dances in several languages, and composed music for others. Her choreography transcends barriers of religion, geography, or language, which is what sets it apart. Her creative teaching methodology has been replicated by many younger teachers of dance who came to the US later. She has developed the mirror-image method of teaching, which is very student-friendly. She is also the author of two books on the fundamental techniques of Bharatanatyam and Kuchipudi, with a unique dance notation which she herself created. These books are being used by many teachers both in India and around the world. Rathna, along with her Anjali Dance Company, has taken the traditional dances of India to cities all over the US, Canada, Mexico and the UK. She has been recognized 3 times as an Outstanding Teacher by the National Foundation for the Arts. One of her students won the Texas Young Masters Fellowship (2018) and became a 2019 Presidential Scholar for Dance (Bharatanatyam).
Rathna has worked wonders in simultaneously educating and entertaining diverse Houston audiences of all ages with her performances, lecture-demonstrations, presentations, and her collaborations with non-Indian artists. To say that Rathna put Indian folk and traditional arts on the Texas map is merely a statement, not an exaggeration. In 1975, with a mere 500 strong Indian community that had never seen an Indian dancer in the city, let alone Texas, she brought her rich artistic heritage from India to Houston, and shared it with the community at large, sowing the seeds of culture that took deep root and spread their branches far and wide. She became the first Indian dance instructor at Rice University (2002) and continues to teach till today. She has been a Teaching Artist with the Young Audiences of Houston for over 33 years, giving elementary schoolers glimpses into Indian folk and classical dances. Her teaching includes classes at the University of Houston, Master Classes at the High School for Performing and Visual Arts and the Houston Community College, and in universities and colleges in faraway states like Alaska. She was selected by the Houston Ballet Academy, Alley Theater and the Asia Society to teach Indian dance movements in their summer intensive workshops, culminating in a creative presentation set to specially composed music.
Firmly believing in the universality of all art, Rathna has collaborated with dancers from New York, Canada, Boston, and Washington, DC, to present programs that simultaneously represent diversity and tradition. Similarly, in Houston, she has worked with dancers from Africa, Middle East, Sri Lanka, Egypt and Spain, to showcase the common denominator of rhythm in all these dance forms. In collaboration with the famous writer Chitra Divakaruni, Rathna has presented “Poetry in Motion”, which combined dance and spoken word. Rathna has created two programs for the Young Audiences of Houston, Hands that Talk and From India with Love, with the purpose of creating awareness of India’s vibrant cultural arts among school children across the city and making them understand that Indian dances are not only beautiful but fun to learn.
Wanting to do more for the promotion of Indian performing arts in the mainstream, Rathna founded Houston’s first nonprofit arts organization, Samskriti, whose mission is to be an efficient cultural conduit between the East and the West. She has developed a series of programs for Samskriti under the title Incredible India, presented at the Miller Outdoor Theatre for the past 15 years, which highlight the wonderful folk and traditional performing arts of India. Through annual grants from local, state, and national arts agencies, Samskriti has presented some of India’s greatest artists to diverse Houston audiences. As Artistic Director, Rathna has curated the First North American Conference on Indian Dance in the Diaspora (2001), The First International Kuchipudi Conference in North America (2003), Tanjavur: Confluence of Cultures, (2010) and Indian Dance in a Global Context (2011).
Rathna has served on the Advisory Boards of Miller Theatre, India Culture Center and Sri Meenakshi Temple, on the Boards of Pratham USA, Indo American Charity Foundation and iEducate, has chaired the Mayor’s Arts Task Force on Cultural Diversity, and served as a dance panelist for Houston Arts Alliance, Texas Commission on the Arts and National Endowment for the Arts. The Houston Press Magazine has called her a “Jewel in the Crown of Houston Arts”. Rathna’s favorite quote – “Everything passes; Art alone, enduring, stays to us” (Agnes de Mille).