Tanya Jayani Fernando

Tanya Jayani Fernando received her PhD in comparative literature from the University of Chicago as the Andrew W. Mellon Fellow. In her scholarship, she works on modernism and the avant-garde across the literary, visual, and performing arts.

She founded the Performance department of the literary journal, The Massachusetts Review. After pursuing a career in academia, she is now focusing on playwriting.

Fernando’s writing is fluid: her scholarship and creative work each inform the other. She is spearheading a project between artists and scholars: a cycle of three experimental plays being created collaboratively by visionary artists/intellectuals that explore the questions: how do we share a world? How is beauty both the vessel and the work?

The plays, including Dance, Salome! Dance!, offer beauty to take us to the just—take us to the sacred.