Mallika Tatavarti is an actor and writer based in New York City.

She was born in Virginia to Indian immigrants and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area (after an 11-month stint in the Chicago suburbs). She speaks Telugu at home, English everywhere, and French in moments of bravery.

She received her BA in Communication, with two minors in English and French & Francophone Studies, from the University of Pennsylvania in May. (With a semester at Columbia University in Paris/Université Paris-Sorbonne!) She studied acting at the Atlantic Acting School.

She was selected for the acting company for Clubbed Thumb’s New Play Development Fellowship, where she’s workshopping Jonathan Journals Spontaneously Combusted (by Max Mooney, dir. Terrence I Mosley) for its Winterworks premiere. She recently: was the director, as well as a 4-year cast member and writer, for Bloomers Comedy, the nation’s first sketch comedy troupe for underrepresented gender identities in comedy; shot her third short film; and played Athena in Gracie Gardner’s Athena at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

She also writes plays, screenplays, and essays. This is her Substack page, where she shares some of those essays. If you’d like to see more of her writing, please contact her!

She loves weird, funny, heartfelt, honest art that makes her feel incandescently alive and big and small at the same time. She likes to act because she likes to hold people’s hands. She likes to write because she likes to hold people’s hands. She likes to sing because it’s stupid fun (and she likes to hold people’s hands).

Some other things she loves: California, strawberry jam, raspberry jam, bouldering badly, good smells, ice cream with rainbow sprinkles, Fall, Norah Jones, yoga, and the movie Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara. If she were a fairy, she’d be a water fairy for sure.