Suja Raghuram

Suja Raghuram Manoj is the daughter of legendary dance director, director, and producer in the Indian Film Industry, K.S. Raghuram. Raghuram began learning Kathakali, aged five from prominent dance expert Guru Gopinath, and then in 1956, he switched to learning Bharatanatyam under danseuse K. J. Sarasa. He learned dance alongside J. Jayalalitha, with the pair both having their arangetram in 1960. Raghuram was asked to assist dance director A. K. Chopra for an M. G. Ramachandran (MGR) movie. He then started out on his own in 1974 and went on to choreograph Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Hindi movies. He has worked on several films with Kamal Haasan, early on in his career, choreographing celebrated work in Sagara Sangamam (1983) about a classical dancer, and in the romantic Hindi film Ek Duuje Ke Liye (1981). Raghuram also went on the direct the 1995 Bengali film, Bhagya Debata, starring Mithun Chakraborty and Rajinikanth. Suja is also the great grand-daughter of director Krishnaswami Subrahmanyam. Her mother, Girija comes from a family of choreographers, which includes Brinda and Kala. Suja herself started as a stage dancer at the age of 5. She completed somewhere around 500 dance performances all around the world. She was an actress for about 5 years and worked on 2 television dramas with around 350 episodes each along with a couple of feature films. Suja opened her own dance studio in Cincinnati, Ohio with close to 300 students. Now Suja has been successfully running RAA (Raghuram Arts Academy) in Los Angeles, California for the past 3 years.