hello!

Aarushi Agni (she/they, @aarushifire) is a queer South Asian writer, poet, comedian, musician, actor, artist, educator, activist and person. She recently won the Total Sellout Award at NYC Fringe Festival 2025 for her solo show Emoji: The Hieroglyphs of Our Time, or how I learned to stop worrying and send the risky text 🤷🏽‍♀️, which Time Out New York called a “sharp and funny mix of music, comedy and multimedia explores risky texts, emoji semiotics, and how we navigate love, longing and global crises through connections both digital and deeply human.”

Aarushi’s personal essays, cultural criticism, poetry, and humor, appear in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Motley Bloom, Bitch Media, Nerdist, Apartment Therapy, and Belladonna Comedy, among others. Her poetry has been published in Abobozine, Resonance 2: Echo (Nightboat Books) and The Felt. She also writes beautifully poetic text messages — about a thousand of them in a row.

Aarushi got her MFA in Writing from Pratt Institute, where she wrote her thesis in fiction (do you want to publish it?) and received the Taconic Fellowship to compile an oral history archive of older Brooklyn residents called As Told.

As a host, stand-up, performer, and speaker, Aarushi has performed at New York Poetry Festival, New York Queer Comedy Festival, Asian Comedy Festival and iconic venues like Joe’s Pub, and Littlefield. Her notable projects include her work on the all-Asian sketch team Overstep Comedy (featured in New York Times and Time Out New York), the monthly improv show Shoulda Coulda Woulda at Brooklyn Comedy Collective, and her Boogiemanja sketch teams, three of which she named! She’s also been featured on a number of podcasts as a guest performer and voice actor.

She’s a Lead Teacher for Octavia Project, a summer program for girls and non-binary youth of color that uses speculative fiction as a portal for imagining better futures. Agni is a passionate educator, who’s taught many workshops, mostly arts and writing-based!

Aarushi is passionate about putting together joyful spaces that facilitate empowerment and justice through community and art. For the past two years, she’s been raising money for her friend Omnia Alnamla, who has been displaced multiple times in the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people. As Arundhati Roy wrote, “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

Aarushi also an award-winning musician; she’s fronted many bands, including Tin Can Diamonds, which is streaming everywhere. Listen more here. She also appeared in — and composed a song for — the feature film Poets Are The Destroyers. There are a bunch of other cool things Aarushi has done, like one time Gotye liked her cover of “Somebody I Used To Know.” And one time she almost literally ran into Janelle Monae at Afropunk. She hopes you get a chance to talk, so she can tell you all about it.