We return from our season two break with conversation featuring 2025-26 SPCUNY Faculty Fellow Amirtha Kidambi. Host Catherine LaSota chats with Amirtha about her improvisational approach to music, teaching, and activism, and about the many influences in her work, from jazz to Rage Against the Machine. This is an episode to listen to if you want some inspiration about co-creating a better future and a reminder of the important role that art plays in fighting injustice and violence.
About our guest:
Amirtha Kidambi is “heavily invested in decolonization and deconstruction of borders physical, mental and musical” (NPR). Spanning free jazz, punk, noise and Indian devotional music, Kidambi crafts subversive sounds challenging hegemony. Based in Brooklyn-Lenapehoking, Kidambi is an vocalist, improviser and composer focused on critical intervention, responding to our fraught times, in collaboration with musicians including Luke Stewart, Angel & Demons with Darius Jones, Neti-Neti with Matt Evans, Mary Halvorson and William Parker. She is also the composer for the anticolonial films of Suneil Sanzgiri. Leading the protest ensemble Elder Ones which recently released its third album New Monuments, her work garners acclaim from Wire Magazine andtours festivals including Rewire, Le Guess Who?, Berlin Jazzfest and others. She is also the host of Outernational, a new podcast on music and liberation. Kidambi was a 2025 Working Artist Fellow at Pioneer Works and a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University for 2026-2027. An educator and activist, Kidambi teaches at CUNY Brooklyn College and Feirstein Graduate School and organizes with several artist-activist collectives.
Photo by Acudus Aranyian
More about Amirtha Kidambi:
Website: amirthakidambi.com
Substack: amirthakidambi.substack.com
Instagram: @kidominator @outernationalpod @elder.1s
Learn more about Social Practice CUNY.
Follow us on Instagram.
Thank you to our podcast editor Jade Iseri-Ramos, and thank you to Gaius LaSota for our Part of the Practice music.
Part of the Practice logo courtesy of Maliyah Mohamed.
Social Practice CUNY is funded by the Mellon Foundation.
