The Sangeet Millennium Initiative
What Is Sangeet Millennium?
Sangeet Millennium, which Dr. Amie Maciszewski founded in 2002 and leads, is an initiative that presents mainly traditional, but also new, music and dance of the Indian subcontinent through collaborative and interactive performance, workshops, classes, festivals, and sometimes films.
Our mission consists of utilizing the music and dance culture of the Indian subcontinent/South Asia as a base upon which to bring together people of diverse backgrounds, generations, and abilities in the joyful exploration of the rich diversity of music and dance in the world for the common good: to raise people’s awareness of and, ultimately, respect for different types of this ultimate human expression.
We aim to carry this out by:
1. Community involvement in the role of cultural mediator/facilitator between performers and other artists, students, arts lovers, educators, and the public, working with all to place culture at the core of a strategy that uses the arts to express diverse (often under-represented) cultures.
2. Working to stimulate social impact in the community while co-creating an interdependent, intersectional, and sustainable artistic ecosystem that supports non-commercial world music and dance.
The Sangeet Millennium Ensemble
Sangeet Millennium Ensemble, founded in 2006 through the vision of and led by internationally acclaimed sitarist, teaching artist, and creative culture-worker Dr. Amie Maciszewski, is a collective/project ensemble that presents South Asian music for the world – performing repertoires that seamlessly combine traditional Hindustani, Indo-jazz fusion, and/or world music. The goal of Sangeet Millennium is to inspire, educate, and entertain while celebrating diversity and cultural sustainability through music and the performing arts.
Projects & Programs
Sangeet Millennium exists to bridge the gap between people, cultures, and the world. A part of our work is to facilitate larger initiatives, programs, and collaborations towards this end.
South Asian Music for the World
This multidisciplinary project consists of annual series of performances and educational outreach workshops Dr. Amie and Sangeet Millennium have been presenting since 2018 to showcase the music and dance of the Indian subcontinent. A hallmark of Amie’s work style is the combination of her high-quality artistic product with education and outreach.
Through these events, the project not only showcased high-quality artistic performances but also fostered community engagement and cultural education, making traditional South Asian arts accessible to a wider audience.
Pakistan
Dr. Amie was part of a Texas-based team awarded a grant by the American Institute of Pakistan Studies. Along with Dr. Michael Hirsch, Amie led workshops on research methodologies across Pakistan in 2018. Her efforts included a residency at Karachi’s National Academy for Performing Arts, where she performed and led ethnography workshops, and advocacy for the Khwaja Sira community in Lahore. Amie also engaged with Power99 FM in Islamabad, promoting educational broadcasts in regional languages. Her work culminated in a research project in Hunza on traditional music preservation and a workshop at Fatima Jinnah Women’s University, blending music education with cultural outreach.
