ArunDitha (b. 1988)
BIOGRAPHY
ArunDitha (born Deborah Arunditha Emmanuel, 1988) is a (mostly) South Asian diaspora poet, singer, actor, educator and movement artist born and intentionally based in Singapore. She is the frontwoman for the music project Mantravine and a founding co-organiser at Opens, a para-academic forum to catalyse alternative discourse. She is driven to unapologetically embody her diasporic-extraterrestrial nature through acts of creation, in practice of being a cosmic void of decentered self, which might also be known as a planetary body/earth, as hybridised deity consciousness or a collective societal human/less/ness. Channeling the non-human is fundamental to her work in poetic reworlding, wherein creative psychospiritual technologies like song and spoken word birth deviant realities through the bodies of instigators. Through poetic reworlding we illuminate new fictions in work and beingness— for ourselves and for the collective. May we dream a different world into existence, one Act at a time.
ArunDitha’s work has been shared and performed in a variety of settings locally and abroad. Some of these places include TEDx Singapore, The Esplanade Singapore, the Barcelona International Poetry Festival, Wonderfruit (Thailand), Literarisches Colloquium Berlin (first Singaporean resident writer), and The Watermill Center (New York) where she debuted “Hush”, her first performance art piece. She has opened for or toured with poet-performers like Sarah Kay, Luka Lesson, Anthony Anaxagourou and Alok Vaid-Menon, and won poetry slams in Singapore, New Zealand, Australia and Germany.
ArunDitha’s first poetry collection, When I Giggle In My Sleep, was published by Red Wheelbarrow Books early 2015. Her creative non-fiction work Rebel Rites, was self-published/crowdfunded in 2016. Her third book Genesis: Visual Poetry Collection was launched in 2018. Her poetry and prose have been published by the likes of The Straits Times, Math Paper Press, Ethos Books, and Penguin Random House (India). This includes the essay “The Seven-Year Cycle”, first published in Making Kin: Ecofeminist Essays from Singapore by Ethos Books in 2021. Her latest publication rib/cage is the first folio with AFTERIMAGE, published in February 2025. She has also released multiple music albums as a lead vocalist and collaborated on many sound works. This includes her current biggest projects Mantravine and Polymorphism, which have toured internationally.
In recent years, ArunDitha’s practice has been most influenced by spiritual research, political & feminist discourse, as well as contemporary & indigenous poetry. Her current practice and experimentations explore poetry as sound and body through looping as a tool of deconstruction and Butoh as imbricated movement of words.
Author Photo and Biography © ArunDitha. All rights reserved.
