Between Body and Page: The World of Himangini Puri

There is a particular kind of restlessness that belongs to the truly creative. It is the restlessness that refuses to be contained by a single medium, a single city, a single version of itself. Himangini Puri – a poet, screenwriter, choreographer, and author, and now enrolled in UCLA’s screenwriting program – has never been content to occupy just one room in the house of art. She fills all of them, and somehow, each one feels like it was made for her.

Known to her followers and collaborators simply as Himi, Himangini was born and raised in New Delhi, steeped in the richness of Indian classical performance from childhood. She began dancing at the age of five, training in Kathak before expanding her vocabulary to include techniques as varied as Humphrey, Limón, Cohan, Release, and Ballet. India gave her roots. The world would give her wings.

A Global Education, an Uneasy Identity: In 2014, at a time when many of her peers were settling into conventional paths, Himangini decided to leave India and pursue dance seriously, globally. She studied in Singapore, crossed over to England to earn her BA in Dance Studies from Middlesex University in London, and spent time in Malta and Spain, each stop adding new layers to her artistic sensibility.

It was an education built for someone who never intended to belong to just one tradition. To become an artist who sits at the meeting point of many forms, many cultures, and many ways of knowing is its own kind of rigorous calling, and Himangini pursued it with full commitment. Yet this very quality, the blending of the Indian and Western worlds, also became one of her most persistent challenges. Her work, she has said, was often perceived as too complicated, as reaching beyond the familiar frames of the Indian artistic establishment rather than settling comfortably within them. Where others might have read that as a flaw, Himangini understood it as a direction.

She pressed on regardless.

When the World Stopped, the Words Began: Like so many artists of her generation, Himangini ‘s life was upended by the pandemic. The lockdowns in India made dancing, her lifelong home, suddenly impossible. For nearly twenty years, movement had been her first language. Its loss was not a small thing.

But in that silence, something else emerged. Himangini turned to writing with the same seriousness she had once given to the stage, and in 2023, her debut poetry collection, Unrooting: Musings of an Unsettled Psyche, was published. The book is, in many ways, an autobiography of displacement: about leaving places, leaving people, shedding inherited selves, and sitting with the uneasy tenderness of discovering who you are when everything familiar is stripped away.

Divided into five sections, musings, love poems, dark poetry, worldly thoughts, and self-love, the collection spans topics as intimate as heartbreak and as expansive as outer space.

Her poems, which she calls “iterations” or “happenings,” arrive in moments of heightened emotional clarity. The book went on a tour across India, reaching readers in city after city, and the response was immediate. Unrooting became an Amazon bestseller for a month and continues to find new audiences.

For Asian readers in particular, there is something deeply resonant in Himangini ‘s poetic sensibility. She writes about the experience of living between worlds, of being shaped by an Indian upbringing and an international education, of loving in languages that don’t always translate, of belonging everywhere and nowhere at once. It is a condition many in the Asian diaspora know intimately.

While living in Mumbai during this period, Himangini was also a vivid presence on the city’s literary and performance circuit. She performed and hosted poetry nights at the Habitat, one of Mumbai’s most beloved stages for poets and comedians, and at Soho House Mumbai, bringing her work to audiences who came expecting to feel something and were rarely disappointed. Her multidisciplinary productions, weaving together words, movement, photography, and music, were staged at the Tao Art Gallery, one of the city’s most prestigious venues. She also wrote and directed music videos for Indian rapper TWINQ, extending her storytelling instincts into the visual medium.

In 2024, still based in Mumbai, Himangini did something she had never planned to do. She wrote a television pilot, a dark comedy titled Heer, with no prior screenwriting experience and no guarantee it would lead anywhere.

It led somewhere remarkable.

The pilot was optioned, and Himangini eventually sold the entire season to Junun Motion Pictures. Just like that, she was a screenwriter. The story of how it happened is, in her own words, a case of being “thrown into the deep end quite quickly.” The film industry, she has noted, operates on its own logic: some things happen in the blink of an eye; others take years. For Himangini , Heer was the blink.

Also in 2024, she delivered a TEDx talk at TEDxEMWS in Mumbai, titled Unrooting Poetry and Its Power, and took home the IFP’14 Silver Award for Poetry, a recognition that placed her work in conversation with some of the most compelling literary voices of her generation. The previous year, she had performed at the Festival of Libraries 2023, an event organised by the Indian Ministry of Culture, one of many stages that confirmed her standing as a writer whose reach extended well beyond the page.

Los Angeles, and What Comes Next: Today, Himangini Puri is in Los Angeles, enrolled in a professional screenwriting program at UCLA, one of the most storied film schools in the world. The move is itself a kind of statement: that she is not merely dipping a toe into cinema, but diving in with both the discipline and the ambition it demands.

Her first feature screenplay, Nevermind, is complete and waiting for the world. It is a drama-comedy that follows Indian characters, some from India, some born in the US, as they navigate love, identity, and the strange gravity that keeps two former partners in each other’s orbits long after the relationship has ended. The film asks viewers to sit with uncomfortable, real situations and find empathy in the discomfort. It is very much a Himi film: no easy answers, only better questions.

A second feature, a family drama, is also in development, alongside a coming-of-age novel. And even as her focus shifts increasingly toward the screen, Himangini has not left dance behind. Her online course on the Principles of Choreography, built in collaboration with her professors at Middlesex University and hosted on Udemy, continues to reach students around the world, a quiet but meaningful reminder that for her, movement and storytelling have never been separate things.

The Storyteller Above All: What ties all of this together, the poetry, the choreography, the screenwriting, the teaching, is something Himangini herself has articulated with characteristic precision: she is a storyteller first, and everything else second.

“I dance about the things I can’t write,” she has said, “and write about the things I can’t dance.” It is a line that captures her practice perfectly, not a hierarchy of mediums, but a conversation between them. She moves through disciplines the way she moves through the world: with curiosity, with rigor, and with an instinct for what is true.

For Asian audiences, particularly those who have navigated the distance between cultural inheritance and personal becoming, between the home they were born into and the life they are building, Himangini Puri’s story offers something rare. Not inspiration in the motivational-poster sense, but the deeper kind: the kind that comes from watching someone refuse to be small, refuse to choose one version of themselves, and find, in that refusal, a voice that can hold the full weight of a life.

She is, as Los Angeles is beginning to discover, only just getting started.