Minati Mishra

Minati Mishra is an Indian classical dancer who got many chances to act in Indian cinema. Thus she kept her passion and commitment to film and dance and entertained the audiences. She was born in Cuttack in 1929. She used to watch regularly stage plays like ‘Annapurna Rangamancha’ when they were enacted in her state.

She drew her inspiration from performance of Laxmipriya Mohapatra, wife of Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra Bio coming soon... >> Read More... , and then climbed the ladder of her success as a prolific dancer through patience and devotion in her life. She is perhaps the only dancer today (age of 80) who can still cast a spell though her dancing skills. Her dream is to dance till death. In order to enter classical dance training, she had wanted to complete post graduation in Odia literature first.

Later she learnt first Bharatanatyam as Odissi was not considered as a classical dance then. She came to Rukmini Devi Arundale’s Kalakshetra in Madras where she stayed for five years and learnt the skill of dancing from Chokalingam Pillai. Later she did a doctorate on dance in Germany too. But later she quit Bharatanatyam and used her talent for promotion of Odissi dance. While she was on a dance trip, she came across a film producer who was in search of an actress who had proficiency in dance for his film and approached her.

She took the offer as an experiment and had acted in four award-wining films of Odia- Suryamukhi, Jeevan Sathi, Sadhana and Arundhati. She was later approached by a Bengali filmmaker Tapan Sinha   Tapan Sinha, one of the foremost Indian directo >> Read More... for his film Nirjan Saikat. However, she understood films would disturb her dancing career and she withdrew from films. She even had performed with sitar maestro Ravi Shankar Ravi Shankar is a music director cum programmer in >> Read More... . Minati has been honored with Padma Shri and Sangeet Natak Akademi Award. She married Nityananda Mishra and after his demise she retired from dancing but takes interest in giving lecture and perform dance on stages very occasionally.