I am an early career researcher in social anthropology & performance studies. I write to critically engage with social, political, affective dimensions of dance in everyday life in contemporary South Asia and in the Asian diaspora. I have been broadly interested in lives and experiences of communities living in the northeast regions of India, and use ethnography to study performance and visual cultures, transregional and transnational exchanges in art, and slow transformation of borderlands in conflict. My ongoing research on performances and heritage is studied from the intersections of marginality, precarity, resistance. 

I completed my PhD from King's College London (India Institute, School of Global Affairs) on a scholarship from the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission. I have previously read social anthropology from School of Oriental and African Studies (London), on a Felix Scholarship, and theatre and performance studies from School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi). 

I have been a Graduate Anthropology Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History (Washington DC), on a Research Fellowship with the Showtown Collections (Blackpool, UK), on a Research Commission with the Museum of Colour (London) and on a Fellowship with Women's History Network (UK). 

I have been awarded a British Academy SRG for archival ethnography on the study of photography and performance cultures of the communities inhabiting the north-eastern region of India (April 2024 - December 2025). 

I currently work at the Bodleian Libraries, Collection & Resource Description, University of Oxford.

Email:  debanjali.biswas@gmail.com

Twitter: @DilebJaan