About

Yaman Kalyan Pattanaik is an Odissi and Indo-Contemporary dancer, choreographer and instructor based in Southern California. Her foundation is the classical Odissi body — chowk and tribhangi, the bhangis that travel between them, the hastas and the long sculptural line — and, above that, abhinaya: the expressive craft that lets a face and a pair of hands carry a story rather than decorate one. Trained from the age of seven and holding the Visharad Purnam certification from Akhil Bharatiya Gandharva Mahavidyalaya Mandal, Mumbai, she carries a single unbroken teaching lineage — from Guru Smt. P. Sudharani in Ahmedabad, through Guru Shri Ramesh Chandra Jena in Bhubaneswar, to Guru Shri Pabitra Kumar Pradhan in California.

Around that foundation she has built a wider movement vocabulary: Indo-Contemporary floorwork, weight-sharing and release; semi-classical and Bollywood fusion; and collaborative work across forms, including a fusion of Odissi with Sri Lankan Kandyan dance. Her choreography lives at that meeting point — the temple repertoire’s devotional poetry and mythological women, set against contemporary scores, contemporary structure, and the demands of the screen. Musicality is where she pushes hardest: odd counts, syncopation against a classical line, phrases that resolve later than the ear expects, and in one film the Fibonacci sequence used to build choreography that grows the way a raga does.

Born in Bhubaneswar, Odisha — the city Odissi comes from — and raised in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, Yaman learned the form at a distance from its source and then travelled back toward it. She has performed at Odissi Odyssey (University of North Carolina, Charlotte), the Lotus Festival in Los Angeles, the Asian American Dance Festival in San Diego, the Irvine Global Village Festival, The Art of Living World Culture Film Festival, and Blackman Auditorium at Northeastern University. She teaches and choreographs with Rangeela Dance Company in Los Angeles.

Yaman builds her artistic life side by side with a career in engineering. She holds a Master’s in Engineering Management from Northeastern University and currently works as a Senior Solution Architect at Niagara Bottling — a discipline of systems thinking and problem-solving that, she has found, sharpens rather than competes with her choreographic process.