Jaivardhan Lakhera

Jaivardhan Lakhera is an actor and performance scholar from Delhi. Jaivardhan holds a Master's degree in Performance Studies from Ambedkar University, (class of 2023), where he studied under Anuradha Kapoor and Deepan Sivaraman.  He has performed in numerous national and international theatre productions and represented India at the South Asia Youth Conference in Kathmandu in 2017.  In films, he portrayed Vandit in My Hate Letter to Cycles and/or Self Harm, directed by Harsh Vardhan Kumar, which was selected for multiple film festivals across India, including the Darbhanga International Film Festival (2024) and the Mumbai International Film Festival, 2024 (MIFF). He also played the lead role in the film Notes on Something Called Hope, which was officially selected for the Women's International Film Festival of Nigeria (WIFFEN) and the Buenos Aires International Film Festival Channel (BUEIFF) in 2022.  He has acted in over 15 stage productions, including The Just Assassins (2017), Mriga Trishna (2017), Fishes of Kamloops (2018), Kissagoi (2021), and "Ila-Arun" (2022-23). While at the University of Delhi, Jaivardhan was an active member of Shunya, the dramatics society of Ramjas College, and earned acclaim for his role in Talchhat (2019), a stage adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, which won numerous awards and was featured at the Old-World Theatre Festival in 2019 organised by Keval Arora.

Recently, his performance piece To the Bones (2023) was staged at the International Festival of Theatre Schools (IFTS) in Kerala.  His approach leans towards Michael Chekhov's psychophysical techniques, and he is currently dedicated to deepening his understanding of these methodologies and various systems in acting. In addition to his work in performance art, Jaivardhan Lakhera is a part-time faculty member at Mumbai University, where he teaches contemporary critical theory and drama production.