India Sky’s multidisciplinary art practice of music, moving image, installation, dance and performance investigates the invisible forces of ancestry, power and spirit that shape her experience, and engages radical imagination as a source for transformation, communion, homecoming, liberation, and survival. Her work as a stage and video/film director, producer, choreographer and performer is guided by her passion for world making and her practice of creating and contributing to platforms that uplift Black, queer and femme voices. India received a BA in Theater with a minor in Media Arts from Antioch College in 2008 and an MA in Artist Film and Moving Image from Goldsmiths University of London in 2020.

Artist Statement

“Afro-Surreal presupposes that beyond this visible world, there is an invisible world striving to manifest, and it is our job to uncover it.” - D. Scott Miller

This quote from D. Scott Miller’s Afro-Surrealist Manifesto articulates the driving force behind my artistic practice in which I combine storytelling, acrobatic arts, dance, moving image and digital media as a means to invoke nascent mythologies rooted in Black, mixed-race, queer, femme experiences. These works serve as blueprints for witnessing and shaping my personal and collective existence, and as interventions to dominant cultural narratives in which queer Black femme experiences are erased and or subjected to violence. 

My work often requires my entire body in its creation and presentation.  It is a means to find presence, occupy grand visions, articulate truths and birth possibilities. My body is a crossroads of a past and future that is both specific to, and larger than me. From this crossroads I engage a foundational purpose of my work; fostering and articulating connections between the physical and spiritual world. 

I am just as interested in space and environment as containers for connection between the living, spiritual and ancestral. I make collaborators of immense wild landscapes so they can help shape the stories I am compelled to tell. I create altars of moving image with the desert, ocean, and forest serving as portals captured on film. I perform pole dance rituals in urban intersections, casting spells to counteract the violence femmes of color experience on the street. I create installations of light, color, texture, and sound to extend my inner sensations of grief and love outward, creating sensory seas that I may both be awash within, and share with others. 

From 2012 - 2019 I served as co-founder and Artistic Director of an all queer and trans artist of color performance company, Topsy Turvy Queer Circus where I participated as a director, choreographer, performer, writer, mentor, designer, and producer.  My dedication to worldmaking, and facilitation of individual and collective connection to sources of power leads me to create art works, as well as the networks and platforms to support them.