Ganavya Doraiswamy was born on July 21, 1991, in
New York City, United States. When she was 7, her family moved to the town of
Senkottai, and then later to
Chennai, the capital of the
South Indian state of
Tamil Nadu. In India, Ganavya learned to play
jalatharangam from her grandmother
Seetha Doraiswamy, and studied
Carnatic music and
Bharatanatyam. Her mother practiced the
Pandharpur Wari. She has one brother. Ganavya was homeschooled for portions of her childhood instead prioritizing arts training, but later obtained undergraduate degrees in theater and psychology at
Florida International University at 19. She then worked briefly as a rehabilitation counselor at
Everglades Correctional Institution in Florida before earning a graduate degree at
Berklee College of Music. After graduating, Ganavya taught a course on South Asian music at
Berklee Valencia. She has a graduate degree in
Ethnomusicology from
UCLA and a Ph.D. in Creative Practice and Critical Inquiry from
Harvard University, where she helped lead the Songwrights Apothecary Lab, an experimental music-based research lab founded by Spalding. Her dissertation advisors were
Esperanza Spalding and
Claire Chase, with committee members including
Peter Sellars. She co-founded the We Have Voice Collective. ==Career==