Anooj Bhandari is an artist (puppetry, stilts, and writing for stage, page, and screen) and community organizer who enjoys creating performance that feels like witnessing illustration and animation. Since 2018, he has been an ensemble member of the NY Neo-Futurists. He toured his show Chai Chai over 500 miles on bikes with Agile Rascal Theater and is currently developing new work with Radical Evolution and SoHo Rep.
Past residencies include the Lighthouse Residency at the BEAM Center, and The Bandung Residency with the Asian American Arts Alliance and Museum of Contemporary African Diasporic Arts. Bhandari is a 2025-28 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, and a Fulbright recipient in Creative Writing and Ecology, developing Magical Realism rooted in South-Asia. He teaches playwriting at Marymount Manhattan College. He spends a lot of time thinking about how and why we gather, and what lives and thrives at the intersection of divination and abolition, and is currently working on completing his first poetry anthology with the editorial support of a MacDowell Fellow he became friends with during his residency, Rachel Han, titled How to Disarm a Nuclear Bomb.
While at MacDowell, Bhandari completed a draft of his first short film titled Blossoming Wasp, a transposition of previous audio and performance work centering the fig fruit and the art of counterfeit. In addition, he further developed the fables and mythology of a cast of puppets he started working with while touring his show Chai Chai and completed a draft of a new play about two friends who are abducted by an alien spaceship run by a dog and an energy source who just cannot stop feeling, titled In Heat.
