Multi-Talented Interdisciplinary Artist, Serena Chopra
Serena Chopra
In this profile series, Revry is highlighting authentic contributors to the LGBTQ media and entertainment community. We ask questions to find out who they are and where they are going in the future. The questions remain the same but the answers tell their unique story. It’s time to explore and celebrate true representation beyond the limits of Hollywood.
Serena Chopra is a teacher, writer, dancer, filmmaker and a visual and performance artist. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Denver and is a MacDowell Fellow, a Kundiman Fellow, a RedLine Artist In-Residence and a Fulbright Scholar (Bangalore, India). She has two books, THIS HUMAN (Coconut Books 2013) and IC (Horse Less Press 2017), as well as two films, DOGANA/CHAPTI (Official Selection at Frameline43, Oregon Documentary Film Festival, QueerX and Seattle Queer Film Festival) and MOTHER GHOSTING (2018). She was a featured artist in Harper's Bazaar (India) as well as in the Denver Westword’s 100 Colorado Creatives. She has recent publications in Sink, Foglifter, Matters of Feminist Practice and the anthology, Alone Together: Love, Grief and Comfort in the Time of COVID-19 (winner of the 2021 Washington State Book Award). In October 2020, Serena co-directed NO PLACE TO GO, an artist-made queer haunted house with Kate Speer and Frankie Toan. Serena is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Seattle University. You can find out more at SerenaChopra.com
What are you best known for?
I am a writer, filmmaker, soundscape designer and dancer. I often combine all mediums--text, moving image, sound and movement--to create interdisciplinary works. To me, interdisciplinarity is the embodiment and performance of queerness in form, aesthetic, craft, process, etc. In other words, interdisciplinarity animates queer desires, imaginations and bodies.
What is the first thing you worked on?
As an interdisciplinary artist, I have many firsts--my first full-length book of poetry was THIS HUMAN (Coconut Books, 2013), my first sound work was a 40-minute soundscape for the production of my book IC: A SOCIOLINGUISTIC CONSPIRACY THEORY and I have been dancing since I was 2-years old but my first professional performance was in 2010 with Evolving Doors Dance, a company I danced with for 8 years. My first film, DOGANA/CHAPTI (Official Selection at Frameline43 and Seattle Queer Film Festival), presents narratives of identity, family and sociopolitical perspectives from queer Indian and Indian American women and female-assigned NB folks. The film's title comes from the 18th century Urdu feminist poetic form, the rekhti, which inspects sexual desires between women and employs terms like "dogana," used to designate a woman’s self-chosen female friend and "chapti," a term denoting the rubbing and clinging of female-to-female intercourse. As a queer Punjabi-American, this film was a deeply and personally significant project--I was determined to explore the diversity of queer experiences in the South Asian community in order to better understand my own experience as the lesbian daughter of South Asian immigrants. It has been incredibly poignant to hear how much the film has meant to other SA queers as well--connecting through narrative provides a kind of legitimacy and empowered visibility--it allows us to recognize ourselves simultaneously inside of and beyond lineage, tradition, parental expectations and history. This film exemplified the ways that narrative is a brilliant rhizomatic tool for affecting socio-political change to long-standing regimes of oppression and violence. Narrative creates connections and connections catalyze shifts that are meaningful no matter how intimate or amplified they are.
What are you working on that no one knows about yet?
I am currently working on a series of digital animations composed with images from my family archive. As part of a larger text-based project, the film animations explore lineages of domestic violence alongside the gendered and racial violences of the nation-state.