Supriya Nagarajan, a Bombay born Indian musician, who studied Carnatic Vocal music from the age of five, is the founding member and CEO of Manasamitra, a UK based arts organisation. Her passionate love of music drove her to achieve great things and the desire to help people from all backgrounds to find that passion within themselves.

Having built up a successful career in the banking sector it was in 2005 that Supriya founded Manasamitra as a way of fulfilling her passion for music and presenting traditional and contemporary Indian art, giving UK audiences an ambience of India, its tradition and culture.

In acknowledgement of her work as a creative entrepreneur, Supriya received a nomination for the 2012 National Microsoft Diversity Awards for her contribution to promoting diversity and access to the arts.

As CEO of Manasamitra, Supriya delivers a variety of arts projects and performances from visual arts to music both classical and contemporary alongside artistic interventions in social and community settings. Manasamitra has toured extensively across Europe bringing its unique cultural experience to non-traditional performance spaces in order to engage and inspire new audiences in public spaces, including the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, York Minster, Huddersfield University, National Railway Museum, Tatton Park and Kew Gardens.

Through Manasamitra she supports over 40 artists locally and nationally and is an active mentor in the local community to artists and school children alike seeking out ways to create career pathways and opportunities for individuals to overcome socio-economic barriers and achieve their goals.

Supriya is one of the most sort-out Carnatic vocalists in the UK and has performed around the world in India, Thailand, Cambodia, Europe and the UK. Supriya has worked with a number of artists from other genres creating new musical vocabulary and constantly widening the boundaries through collaboration. She enjoys setting her work in unusual spaces and has been commissioned to create music responses to the artists Andy Goldsworthy, David Nash and other sculptors exhibiting at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. She also worked closely with a Cultural Olympiad project, Stanza Stones, exploring the Yorkshire Moors, the poetry of Simon Armitage and Indian classical music.

Supriya is currently researching bees and their habitats and has devised a 40 minute musical theatre piece for early year’s family settings. As part of her “Life of a Bee” project, Supriya was invited to be a resident artist at the beautiful Kingsbrae gardens in New Brunswick, Canada in summer 2017, where she did preliminary composition work on her album highlighting the dwindling bee population. She is currently composing new work based on studies on collective intelligence of bees and its application in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Supriya has also composed an evensong for the prestigious choir at York Minster using cross cultural influences which is a first for the Minster. This resulted in an invited performance at Lambeth Palace in the presence of the Archbishop of Canterbury. She has recently composed a large scale experimental choir work which was presented at the prestigious Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in 2018.

Supriya is currently one of the selected New Voices being mentored by Sound and Music as part of their 2018 programme.