Impact and Leadership
Mentorship and institution-building across generations
Rachna Nivas’s work as an educator and leader has shaped generations of dancers, teachers, and cultural practitioners across the United States. Through decades of teaching, institution-building, and mentorship—from her leadership at the Chhandam School of Kathak in the San Francisco Bay Area and the direction of youth training initiatives like Leela Youth Dance Company, to the development of adult programs and the cultivation of emerging educators and artists in New York—her impact lies not only in technical transmission, but in empowering individuals through the dance while building environments where rigor, cultural integrity, and individual agency coexist.
Deeply rooted in the lived realities of the South Asian diaspora, her approach to mentorship centers depth over speed, relationship over hierarchy, and long-term artistic growth over short-term visibility, fostering practitioners who are not only skilled dancers, but thoughtful leaders equipped to carry Indian classical arts forward with clarity, responsibility, and vision.
Rachna Nivas’s work in New York began with a clear vision: to bring the teachings and artistic approach of legendary kathak master Pandit Chitresh Das into the cultural fabric of New York City. While Das had established a prolific legacy in California over five decades, New York, despite its position as a global dance capital, offered few opportunities to experience this lineage and depth of kathak practice. Beginning with grassroots workshops and performances, Nivas encountered an immediate response, affirming a strong desire within the city for an ancient oral tradition rooted in depth, commitment, reverence, and play.
This momentum led to the formation of the Leela Dance NYC Initiative in 2016, a pilot program of the Leela Dance Collective. As interest continued to grow, she relocated full-time from San Francisco to New York City in 2020 to focus on building this work. In 2021, the initiative was formalized as Leela NY, an official center of Leela’s educational arm, with fiscal sponsorship through the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Leela NY developed into a comprehensive education and training hub, offering kathak and North Indian classical music instruction; annual large-scale student productions on NY stages; a long-running summer immersion program; teacher development and apprenticeship pathways.
As the New York initiative matured, its relationship to Leela Dance Collective evolved. Leela continues as an artist-driven collective dedicated to ensemble creation and large-scale performance, while educational programming has transitioned to be led independently by Leela artists in their respective cities. From this shared understanding, The Kathak Legacy Project emerged—providing a dedicated, place-based structure for Nivas’s New York education and training work, while maintaining ongoing artistic exchange and collaboration with Leela and its artists.
Leela NY (2016 - 2025)
From 2016 to 2025, Rachna Nivas played a central leadership role in building Leela Academy, the educational arm of Leela Dance Collective, which functioned as a unified training initiative across San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, and New York. Formed in the wake of the passing of legendary kathak master Pandit Chitresh Das, the Academy emerged as a cohesive response to a pivotal moment for the field—providing continuity, shared values, and collective stewardship during a time of transition. Co-founded by senior lineage holders Rachna Nivas, Rukhmani Mehta, and Seibi Lee, along with Dr. Sarah Morelli, Leela Academy established a rare, centralized approach to kathak education in the United States—aligning pedagogy, training standards, and artistic vision across multiple cities.
Through shared curriculum development, joint summer intensives, retreats, and cross-city exchanges, the Academy fostered a connected learning ecosystem rooted in intergenerational mentorship and long-term artistic growth. As Leela Dance Collective has since returned its focus to ensemble creation and performance, the Academy has intentionally dissolved, allowing educational work to evolve independently in each city—shaped by local communities and led by the artists who built it. This transition reflects Nivas’s ongoing commitment to responsive, place-based education, while honoring the scale, necessity, and impact of Leela Academy as a formative chapter in her leadership.
Leela Academy (2016-2025)
Rachna Nivas’s commitment to building pride in Indian classical art within the South Asian diaspora has been a defining throughline of her work, particularly in relation to youth. Over more than a decade, she played a central role in shaping what became Leela Youth Dance Company—first as a principal teacher and later as Artistic Director—guiding its evolution from Chhandam Youth Dance Company, a high-level pre-professional ensemble, into a program distinguished by its emphasis on leadership development and teen empowerment alongside rigorous classical training.
Guided by Nivas’s vision, the Youth Company functioned as more than a performance ensemble. While maintaining its high artistic standards, she expanded the program to offer young dancers, particularly South Asian girls, a space to develop confidence, voice, and critical engagement with questions of identity, culture, and belonging. Her leadership positioned classical dance as a vehicle for self-expression, responsibility, and community participation, preparing dancers not only for the stage, but for leadership beyond it.
During her tenure, Nivas introduced initiatives such as Who Are We: Activating Youth Voices in the South Asian Diaspora, a youth conference centered on dialogue and cultural inquiry; a “big sister” mentorship model; and a community service–based leadership program. The company was commissioned to create new work for platforms including the WorldWideWomen Girls Festival, the Philadelphia Youth Festival, and collaborative projects with SFMOMA and Whoop Dee Doo, a contemporary artist-led initiative partnering with youth performers to create original, interdisciplinary productions. Through this work, the Youth Company became a nationally visible model for youth training that integrates classical rigor with leadership development and social engagement.
Leela Youth Dance Company
(formerly Chhandam Youth Dance Company)
Chhandam School of Kathak (2000-2019)
Prior to co-founding Leela Dance Collective, Rachna Nivas was appointed by her guru, the late Pandit Chitresh Das, to direct his educational institution, Chhandam School of Kathak, in the San Francisco Bay Area (2008-2018). During her tenure, she played a pivotal role in shaping the school’s growth and direction, helping to build it into one of the largest and most influential North Indian classical dance institutions outside of India, serving hundreds of students and a broad faculty of teaching artists.
Working closely under Das’s guidance, Nivas led the development of organizational infrastructure, trained and mentored teachers, and expanded the school’s pedagogical reach. She pioneered a large-scale summer camp model that became a cornerstone of the institution, directed expansive school-wide dance dramas involving hundreds of student performers, and thoughtfully evolved Das’s curriculum and teaching methodology to respond to the realities of a changing, diasporic context. This period formed the foundation of her approach to education—rooted in artistic excellence, community building, and the transmission of tradition with care, clarity, and vision—and continues to inform her work as an educator and leader today.