Mesma Belsaré is an interdisciplinary artist working across choreography, classical Indian dance, oil painting, and theater. Her practice is built on a single conviction: that the body carries pre-civilizational freedom beneath every layer of cultural form, and that the work of art, at its most serious, is excavation.
Her training in Bharatanātyam is at the highest tier of the form: under Sri Shankar Hombal at Kalapadma Dance Academy (Bhopal) and under Padmashri Geeta Chandran at Natya Vriksha (New Delhi) — one of the most respected teachers in India, holder of the Padma Shri, the country's fourth-highest civilian honor. Mesma holds a Diploma in Bharatanātyam from Indira Kala Sangeet University. Her practice is rooted in the Thanjavur bani, received through Padmashri Geeta Chandran, whose transmission carries the Swarna Saraswathi lineage alongside the distinct adavu construction of the Dandayudhapani Pillai style. This formation, layered on an early Sri Hombal's Kalakshetra foundation, gives Belsaré's work its particular technical character.
Mesma's original works include The Hourglass (2026), SIREN (2024), En-twined (2009), Unquiet Epics (2010), Zan: Women in the Shahnameh (2010), Carmine Bees (2008), In the Creator's Gaze (dance film 2021), The Vermin's Will (2014), Akshah (2010), Fire to Ice (2004), Shilpa Nrityam (2002). Her fifteen-year body of collaborative choreographic work with Dr. Maya Kulkarni draws on classical Indian iconographic forms — Chola, Mathura, Gandhara — as primary source material, and has been presented at the New York Public Library, Battery Dance Festival, La MaMa, Atlas Performing Arts Center (Washington DC), India International Center (New Delhi), and Kalakshetra Foundation (Chennai).
She holds fellowships in both disciplines — the Dance/USA Fellowship (Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, 2022–23) and the Individual Artist Fellowship for Painting from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and Mid Atlantic Arts (2024) — alongside grants from the Cambridge Arts Council, the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA), and the Government of Delhi.
As a painter working primarily in oil, her practice conducts what she has called a visual archaeology of belonging — surfaces where ancestral narrative, mythic iconography, and personal memory accumulate in the same stratum.
Mesma presents a rare pairing of performance and exhibition credentials — because her two practices are one project in two materials. Her performances have been presented at Lincoln Center, Asia Society, Alvin Ailey Theater, the Harbourfront Centre (Toronto), and Siri Fort (New Delhi). Her paintings are held in public and private collections in the United States, India, Canada, Britain, Holland, and France, and have been exhibited at the Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto), Baruch College (New York), Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Delhi College of Art, and The Triveni Art Enclave (New Delhi).
Mesma is the co-founder of Samvād, a forum for professional classical Indian performing artists committed to rigorous critical discourse.