Harini Sridhar

I was born into a family with a deeply spiritual, nature-oriented, and artistic way of being in the world. I grew up practicing Bharatanatyam, a form of classical dance rooted in sharing stories from ancient Indian scripture. Trained in attending to and performing the many ways we express ourselves–through words, movement, gaze, and silence–I felt at home working with people living with autism, where communication can be both incredibly challenging and incredibly rich. After attending college at Duke University, I moved to Chicago, where I worked in a therapeutic kindergarten classroom as an Applied Behavior Analysis therapist. I also led grassroots initiatives to address mental health disparities in the South Asian diaspora, including organizing a speaker series to increase mental health literacy and creating a national provider database to help community members find culturally humble, multilingual mental health professionals. My goldendoodle Lucky and I then made our way to the Upper West Side, where I completed a Master’s in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University.

My scholarly and creative work explores the intersection of psychiatry, phenomenology, narrative, and embodiment. While in medical school at UNC-Chapel Hill, some of my most meaningful experiences included facilitating phenomenologically-informed narrative medicine workshops at a residential eating disorder treatment center, for patients to reconnect with their identities as artist, sister, and queer, to name a few–rather than feel defined by their illness–as a way to support agency and recovery. Another was teaching two semesters of a narrative medicine course at Columbia called Close Reading and Creative Writing, focused on examining literary elements of a text and their role in distilling meaning from stories. Alongside my academic work, I model for figure drawing classes, perform improv (laughter is my love language), and love being outside and walking barefoot.