Ishita Mili is a Bengali American director, choreographer, and iconoclast based in New Jersey. She is earliest captured dancing at the age of 2, twirling with a yellow blanket in her living room. Ishita soon began formal training in bharatanatyam under Smt. Sudha Devulapalli and Indian contemporary fusion under Kolkata-based Sukalyann Bhattacharya. She won various awards throughout her childhood as a bharatanatyam soloist and performed internationally for movies, music videos, and shows through Sukalyann Dance Entourage. After becoming established in Indian dance forms, she broke out of the boundaries of classical dance and auditioned for UFP Hip Hop Dance Co., performing and choreographing with them from ‘14-’18. She was awarded the Folk Arts Apprenticeship grant in ‘21 from the NJ State Council of the Arts to study Mayurbhanj chhau under Sri Rakesh Sai Babu, world-renowned performer and descendent from a royal lineage of chhau practitioners.
After extensively studying a variety of dance styles, Ishita ventured into creating and directing as a holistic multidisciplinary artist. In 2017, Ishita founded IMGE Dance LLC as a performance company based in dance, film, and music that uses mixed cultural roots to share global stories with artists of diverse backgrounds. IMGE has built bridges across concert, commercial, musical theater, academic industries and Ishita has founded the IMGE Methodology, a concise, holistic, and grounded approach to universal movement storytelling. Ishita has taken this methodology across the US, UK, and India through intensives, universities, and residencies. She has worked with Monica Kapoor, Sumeet Nagdev, Josh Rhodes, Cyrus Khambatta, Preeti Vasudevan, Mecnun Giasar, and more.
Ishita was awarded Artist of Exceptional Merit by the Asian American Arts Alliance ‘23 and was selected into the LabWorks '24-'25 cohort at New Victory Theater. Most recently, Ishita received a 2025 Individual Artist Fellowship award from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She has been interviewed in the Seattle Times, KREM TV, Herald Tribune, Chai with Rai, Monmouth Magazine, and more for her innovation in movement storytelling.
Beyond her artistic practice, Ishita is a deeply involved community advocate and activist. She co-hosts the Kinetic Dance Film Festival, founded South Asian American Arts Solidarity (SAAAS), and co-hosts the South Asian Performing Arts Summit. Ishita also holds a Chemistry BS and Masters of Business and Development with a concentration of Drug Discovery and Development.
