Ganavya

Ganavya Doraiswamy was born on July 21, 1991, in New York City, United States. When she was 7, her family moved to the town of Senkottai, and then later to Chennai, the capital of the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. In India, Ganavya learned to play jalatharangam from her grandmother Seetha Doraiswamy, and studied Carnatic music and Bharatanatyam. Her mother practiced the Pandharpur Wari. She has one brother.

Ganavya was homeschooled for portions of her childhood instead prioritizing arts training, but later obtained undergraduate degrees in theater and psychology at Florida International University at 19. She then worked briefly as a rehabilitation counselor at Everglades Correctional Institution in Florida before earning a graduate degree at Berklee College of Music. After graduating, Ganavya taught a course on South Asian music at Berklee Valencia.

She has a graduate degree in Ethnomusicology from UCLA and a Ph.D. in Creative Practice and Critical Inquiry from Harvard University, where she helped lead the Songwrights Apothecary Lab, an experimental music-based research lab founded by Spalding. Her dissertation advisors were Esperanza Spalding and Claire Chase, with committee members including Peter Sellars.

She co-founded the We Have Voice Collective.