Events & Calendars Alumni-in-Residence: Surviving & Thriving as an Artist with Amrita Vijayaraghavan '07

Amrita Vijayaraghavan is a full-time artist who runs an independent creative practice and business. Amrita’s professional path is defined by versatility of experience and skill–including stints as a classical music agent, venue manager, live-event curator/producer, and managing director of a progressive startup opera company. Now, as part of the duo Vijay & Stephens, she creates original scripted works for television, and writes/produces/directs a variety of projects.

Join us to learn how Amrita navigates creative partnership, built independence as a freelancer, and manages her artistic practice as a business.

Amrita Vijay was raised in Oregonian suburbs which, at the time, were a lot more "I, Tonya" and a lot less "Portlandia." She spent a transplanted adolescence outside of Cleveland, where her first paid job was playing violin under a 25-foot animatronic Jesus at an evangelical megachurch. Amrita majored in Music and Math at Amherst.

Amrita’s goal as an artist is to hold a mirror to the world as she sees it, with message-driven work that explores universal human experiences, and is unafraid of complexity, nuance, depth, and contradiction. She wants to make creative work that allows people to connect and find commonalities across boundaries, and to tell stories that both reflect our current world and build the world in which she wishes to live.

Learn more about the Alumni-in-Residence program at
https://careers.amherst.edu/channels/alumni-in-residence/