Tirna Sengupta is a dance scholar, Bharatanatyam dancer and administrator who is invested in dance as an embodied, collective and profound process of decolonisation, liberation and subversion of hierarchies. She joined Company of Others as Projects Producer soon after finishing her PhD at the University of Leeds where she researched Adivasi dance in conjunction with the tourism industry in north Bengal, India. This work helped her gain perspective on how the most marginalised communities in the global South use dance to construct their identities, politics and influence their social representation. She brings this learning to the community focused care that Company of Others delivers.
Her works as a Bharanatyam dancer challenge the elitism of the craft and brings it to public spaces for people to engage with. Her dance films with her friends and collaborators contest the religious nationalism and caste supremacy of India and centre queer narratives. Her interviews and articles on Bharatanatyam appeared on the Wire, Scroll, Hindustan times and the Citizen.