Amrita Vijayaraghavan ’07 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 the violin under a 25-foot animatronic Jesus at an evangelical megachurch. In 2011, Amrita co-founded Vijay & Stephens, where she now creates original scripted works for television, and writes, produces, and directs a variety of live, written, and recorded projects.
Amrita graduated from Amherst College with a degree in music and mathematics. After college, she moved to New York City. She worked as a classical music agent, venue manager, festival producer, stage manager, technical director, live-event curator and producer, and the managing director of a progressive startup opera company.
Q: What impact do you hope to have through your career?
A: My goal as an artist is to hold a mirror to the world as I see it, with message-driven work that explores universal human experiences, and is unafraid of complexity, nuance, depth, and contradiction. I want 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 I wish to live.