Shubha Sankaran
composer, arranger & performer

Shubha playing the Surbahar

          Shubha composed, arranged and performed the original music for the award-winning NPR radio series Passages to India and the award-winning 1997 BBC documentary Monsoon, which has also been released on CD by IBA. Her performance has also been featured on NPR's All Things Considered. Shubha studied instrumental music with Ustad Imrat Khan, the world's acknowledged master of the surbahar, and vocal music with the late Pandit Shrikant Bakre. Ms. Sankaran has performed throughout the United States, including at Lincoln center in New York and the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, and in concert, radio and television broadcasts in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Morocco, Central and South America. In 1997, she performed in a major concert tour of Pakistan in observance of the Fiftieth Anniversary of that country's independence, and the following year she gave a concert for President Narayan of India and President Fujimori of Peru at a command performance in Lima, Peru. She has also appeared in a benefit concert to raise money for the Mother Theresa Orphanage in Calcutta. In 1999, she performed for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC in the original chamber ballet Gandhara, and has also composed, arranged, and performed the original music for the ballet Dasavatara. Ms. Sankaran has received grants from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has also received numerous awards for her artistry, including the All Pakistan Music Conference's gold medal and that conference's Saeeda Khan Award for Instrumental music.