An award winning multidisciplinary artist, Vidya Rajan works in writing for stage & screen, contemporary performance, comedy & increasingly in the emerging tech & digital space. She is a graduate of the VCA (Masters – Writing for Performance) and a former writer-in-residence at The Malthouse (2018/19). She has trained extensively in improvisation and play-based making, and been the recipient of a Wheeler Centre Fellowship, Melbourne Festival’s Director’s Lab, Screen Australia Developer Program, Screen Victoria’s Game Writing Initiative, MAV’s Diasporas major commission among others. Most recently was awarded an Australia Council Digital Fellowship for promising artists exploring technologically influenced practices.
In live performance she has worked as a writer, performance and maker in a variety of contexts with companies like The Blue Room, Red Stitch, Malthouse, Belvoir, Darwin Festival, KXT, The Last Great Hunt, Squid Vicious Theatre, Arts House. Some notable works include Asian Ghost-ery Store (Innovation in Cultural Practice Award, Melbourne Fringe); Sleepover Gurlz (intimate, participatory play-based work), The Lizard is Present (a large-scale long-running superfiction/alternate reality game-influenced work), We are Nemeses (live digital sitcom, The Wheeler Centre), Looking for Alibrandi (adaptation by Vidya Rajan; Malthouse/Belvoir 2022); and most recently In Search of Lost Scroll. The latter was an interactive speculative fiction browser-based work that included programming a machine-learning bot based on the artist’s twitter archive and dealt with the ethics of tech monopolies, nostalgia for the commons on the internet and the future of digital selfhood. It won Best Experimental Art at Melbourne Fringe 2022, and went on to be shortlisted for the prestigious International New Media Writing Prize. She was recently commissioned by ACMI on an interactive public artwork employing motion tracking technology and narrative game design.
Interested in collaborative and socially located practices, she curated and dramaturged Proximities (an interactive digital exhibition for Blak and POC creators for Darebin Council), co-devised and dramaturged Sangam Festival’s Dada Desi (a new experimental art gathering for emerging South Asian artists in Melbourne), and developed a discursive poetry commissioning series for Djed Press.
As a screenwriter and performer, Vidya has worked on shows for the ABC, SBS, Netflix, Channel 10, Prime and recently won an AWGIE for Best Comedy Writing for her work on The Feed (SBS, 2022). [www.vidyasrajan.com]
