Writer, theatre actor, literary scholar, and indie musician Akhila Ramnarayan has served as literature faculty and academic administrator at universities in India and the United States. She received her PhD in English from The Ohio State University in 2006, with a specialisation in postcolonial studies. Her research interests include postcolonial/decolonial literary and performance studies, gender, translation, metacognition, and learning.

The 2013-14 recipient of the Sangeet Natak Akademi’s Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar for theatre acting, she has performed and toured nationally and internationally since 2007 with JustUs Repertory, a Chennai-based theatre group founded by playwright-director Gowri Ramnarayan. In 2019, Ramnarayan began writing and recording original songs with multi-instrumentalist Doug Carraway, releasing two full-length records and 2 EPs to date. The two formed the indie rock duo Starcracker in 2024 and recently launched Day Is Night Diaries, a podcast on creative process.

Ramnarayan is working on a collection of old-fashioned essays, a series of meditations on theory, praxis, and performance, and has begun production on her first play script.