Mallika Tatavarti is an actor and writer (and artist and traveler and human girl) based in New York City. She is a proud member of Juilliard Drama Group 59.

In May 2025, she received her BA in Communication, with two minors in English and French & Francophone Studies, from the University of Pennsylvania. (With a semester at Columbia University in Paris/Université Paris-Sorbonne.) She also studied at the Atlantic Acting School.

This past year, Mallika was selected for the acting company of Clubbed Thumb’s 2025 New Play Directing Fellowship, where she workshopped Jonathan Journals Spontaneously Combusted (by Max Mooney, dir. Terrence I Mosley) for its Winterworks premiere. She also 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 fourth 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.

Mallika grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. She speaks Telugu at home, English everywhere, and French in moments of bravery. She loves art that makes her feel incandescently alive and big and small at the same time.

Some other things she loves: California, climbing, solo traveling, a good farmer’s market, ice cream with rainbow sprinkles, fall, chaat, dancing, Diwali parties, yoga, and the movie Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara. If she were a fairy, she’d be a water fairy for sure.