Today we’d like to introduce you to Suchi Sairam.
Suchi, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I’m the product of many intersections. My mission is to integrate the arts, science, culture, leadership and entrepreneurship to help develop great people and spread good in the world around us.
My culture and values have developed at the intersection of the Indian-American experience in the 1970s and 80s. I’m fortunate my parents found a balance between retaining Indian culture and values with which we immigrated, and the openness and opportunity in the United States. It gave me a foundation to explore and carve my unique path.
My experiences have developed at the intersection of engineering, the arts, business, leadership, entrepreneurship and culture. I consider these to be the pieces of glass in my personal kaleidoscope. They allow me to view relationships, opportunities, and problems through different lenses and from different perspectives.
My chronic curiosity has led to being multi-passionate. This combination of values, culture, experiences and curiosity has allowed me to stretch, grow and contribute in different ways.
I started in the arts as a hobbyist, evolved into a professional and a teacher. But I owe my progress and success to being a forever student.
As a dance artist and teacher, entrepreneur and business professional with a range of diverse experiences, I enjoy drawing on different disciplines to create learning experiences. I view art as a vehicle for communication, internal reflection, and personal development.
Some of my path was planned and scripted. Other parts of my path have been littered with happy accidents, such as:
• Co-founding a toy company, and bringing a multi-award winning art-inspired hand-held toy to market
• Creating an Indian arts inspired merchandise line
• Becoming an award-winning children’s book author (Dancing Deepa, published in 2022, and Singing Surya Dreams to Dance to be published in the coming weeks!)
• Becoming a speaker and voiceover artist
• Creating the Quiet Ambition Project, including publishing the weekly Quiet Ambition newsletter, workshops and group cohorts – just for people who want to achieve their ambitions without selling their souls
My dance studio Kala Vandanam was founded in 2022. Sharing dance with my students over the last 23 years is one of my greatest joys. Seeing them grow, gain fluency, and spread their wings is immensely gratifying. Several of them pursue their art seriously while developing careers in other fields and contributing to their community.
Two themes that inspire me daily:
Aspire for excellence always, but never at someone else’s expense.
Every person blossoms in their own time, when fed with the right nutrients.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
I’m grateful many parts of the journey have been smooth.
My parents provided a loving, stable home and really valued education. My dad was unusual bird for an Indian man of his generation, as he insisted that I have an opportunity at the best education possible, and be an independent thinker but without forgetting the value of family and companionship. My talented and generous mother taught me the value of helping others. Together, they taught me if I had abilities or talents, I should use them to help others. This was a wonderful foundation.
My husband of 30 years is my ideal life partner. I call him my better half, because he continually helps me be a better version of myself.
I’m also grateful for all the challenges. Each of them held valuable learnings to help me improve and grow.
I think challenges are inevitable when you work in different fields, and over a long period time. There’s also no shortage of challenge when you experiment and try different things. Some challenges I experienced:
• Struggles to create work-life boundaries
• Paving my own path in the arts when I didn’t “fit a mold”
• Finding between pursuing excellence and achieving “good enough”
• Leadership that didn’t align with my personal or professional values
• Learning the difference between being persistent through challenges and being trapped by a “commitment to the commitment”
The bumps in the road encouraged me to fully embrace my unique set of talents and experiences across many different disciplines.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
My professional practices intersect while occupying their own unique spaces.
My artistic practice and passion centers around a dance form with roots in South India called Bharatanatyam. Important allied practices in percussive music, konnakkol (vocal percussion) and nattuvangam (vocal percussion and hand cymbals for dance) are equal partners to Bharatanatyam for me. Though I was a latecomer to Bharatanatyam at age of 15, it has been integral to my experience for nearly 4 decades.
An active performance career on big stages was never my priority.
I love being in class as a student, and enjoy small, intimate, performances. I really enjoy sharing the art with others on a personal level to create connection. I founded Kala Vandanam in 2002, and am honored to be a sought-after teacher. I am known for a holistic approach to training, sensitive expressional dancing, and strong rhythmic technique. I’m also known as a skilled nattuvangam artist, and enjoy supporting dancers on stage through music.
I deeply integrate adjacent areas of music, history, language, mind-body connection, and personal reflection into dance training. While I aspire to uphold the qualities and quality of my teachers’ work, it is equally important to incorporate my own strengths, talents and experiences into my teaching and creative work.
As a result, my students progress with artistic excellence, humility, and learning. Watching their progress, and seeing them develop their own voices is a great source of joy.
A unique characteristic I bring to my work are the adjacencies to the art forms. This includes authoring children’s books, creating merchandise designs, conducting residential camps, and created offerings to strengthen corporate teams through the intersection of arts and business thinking.
I’m actively developing my media company, which includes my work as a writer, voiceover artist, speaker and mentor. Core to this is the Quiet Ambition weekly newsletter and Quiet Ambition coaching cohorts. Helping ambitious people break through what holds them back and make an impact in their spheres makes my soul smile.
Before we go, is there anything else you can share with us?
I believe enjoying the process unlocks success. Destinations are important. But the journey and the process give and reveal much more than any single event, goal or award.
What helps us enjoy the process?
Humility, gratitude and curiosity. If we approach everything as a beginner, as if you were doing it for the first time, we see and experience it differently. Our eyes are opened to more possibilities. Our hearts are opened to the wonder of the experience.
Enjoy unrelated things, and seek connection between them. Disparate things create unexpected, interesting intersections.
Things that have helped me along the way? Focusing on:
Master craft
Have clarity about values
Share generously with others
Lift others while you lift yourself
Never stop learning and upgrading
Play to your strengths – ALL of them
You don’t have to do it the way others do it
Contact Info:
- Website: kalavandanam.com | suchisairam.com
- Instagram: @kalavandanam | @suchisairam
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/kalavandanam
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/suchisairam
- Youtube: youtube.com/c/kalavandanam | https://www.youtube.com/@suchisairam
- Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/suchisairam-vo
