Worldbuilding across animation, immersive environments, performance, tactile systems and participatory technologies — where the digital and the handmade coexist.
Can we shape beauty without burdening the delicate ecologies we're part of?
Upasana Nattoji Roy — also known as Oona — is a director, multidisciplinary artist, scenographer and design research practitioner. Trained in Animation and Film Design at the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad, her practice over two decades has moved across cinema, craft, performance and emerging technologies — rooted in movement, narrative and cultural plurality.
Her work begins in dialogue: with people, materials, movement, memory, images, sounds, nature and the mediums themselves. Through making, these conversations become ways of listening to multiple viewpoints — human and more-than-human, personal and collective, visible and overlooked. She is interested in how a work can hold these perspectives together without collapsing their differences, creating space for new relationships and forms of attention to emerge.
She works between forms because each offers a distinct way of thinking, feeling and communicating. Movement is central: in the gesture of a dancer, the frame-by-frame pulse of animation, the movement of materials through the hand, and the shifting paths of an audience through a space. Animation, for her, is not simply a technique but a way of bringing bodies, images, memories, materials and time into relation.
Material care is equally important to how she works. She often begins with what already exists — discarded, inherited, found or leftover materials — and lets their histories inform the work. Reusing materials is both a practical commitment to creating with as little waste as possible and a conceptual one: an acknowledgement that materials carry memory, labour and possibility. Working with them asks for attentiveness, adaptation and reciprocity.
Many projects begin with personal experience — not as autobiography, but as a point of departure for wider questions around care, embodiment, memory, ecology and our relationship with technology. Whether through a moving image, a wearable sculpture, an electronic circuit, a performance or an immersive environment, she makes works that invite audiences to pause, sense, and encounter their own connections within a shared and changing world.
Alongside leading film and moving-image work through Switch & Roy Studio, she develops an independent practice in immersive environments, scenographic systems, ecological storytelling and experimental craft–tech collaborations — now from Goa, in quieter ground away from the pace of Mumbai.
National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad — Animation & Film Design.
Animafest Zagreb (2002, 2003) · Hamburg Kurzfilmfestival (2001) · Annecy Film Festival (2001, 2002, 2003) · Anima Mundi (2003) · Bit Film Festival, Germany (2004) · MIAF Australia · SIAF Sydney · Etiuda, Poland · Mumbai International Film Festival (2003) · Bradford Animation Festival · Stuttgart Animation Film Festival · Tehran Animation Film Festival
Goa, India · oona@switchandroy.com · +91 99301 61215
A wearable performance piece developed with Geneva-based MadMapper co-creator Boris Edelstein and dancer Maya — light worn on the body, mapped in real time. Made within the Indo-Swiss Digital Arts Exchange between EyeMyth and Geneva's Mapping Festival, supported by the Pro Helvetia Synergies grant.
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Sculptural wearable forms born from the quiet transformations of nature — a way of paying attention to the unnoticed, the abundant, the beautifully ordinary. Each piece is a meditation on change, presence and the poetry of decay; an exploration of creating without adding more to the world.
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A digital art program playing out across nine zones of screens at diverse scales. With Switch & Roy as artists, researchers, curatorial support and brief-builders — and, for three artworks, as narrative designer, animation director and producer. Featured films include Tailor from Byculla and In Love in Mumbai.
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A live performance bringing together a Bharatanatyam dancer, an animation designer, and artists and musicians from the Warli tribe — envisioned with Prachi Saathi. Thirty-five shows and counting, from Prithvi Theatre and NMACC to the Warli villages of Palghar where the art form originates.
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An interactive installation made with UK-based artist Diane Edwards, building a dictionary of hand gestures — a bridge between human and machine, and between cultures. Shown across India and the UK, and featured in academic studies and a British Council India report.
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A living online archive preserving the Kodava way of life — UI/UX, graph visualisation, research and curation.
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A mixed-media immersive film for India's only interactive music museum — a mother telling a child the story of Indian classical music.
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Making sound visible and space heard — stage visuals at the intersection of art in motion, experience design and scenography for Indian classical and folk forms.
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A centenary film for a handcrafted tile company founded in the Swaraj era — a narrative pieced entirely from archive and their own tile patterns.
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A film on the impact and philosophy of a foundation that has supported 800+ arts projects since 1993 — made to connect funders and artists.
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Open-source process documentation on the theme of HOME — personal narratives co-created by craftspeople, designers, filmmakers and technologists.
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Title sequences and show packaging at the intersection of art in motion and communication design — a nascent field in India.
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Main title design for the forthcoming series — calligraphic identity rendered against landscape.
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Early independent work — a 2D debut shot on film, first explorations in mixed media, and an experiment in the marriage of Indian art forms.
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