Ipsitaa Khullar was born in Chandigarh, India, and grew up across several North Indian cities. She is a behavioral scientist, singer-songwriter, dancer, and actress, whose work spans music, film, and global policy. After graduating from Delhi Public School, R.K. Puram, where she served as Head Girl, she attended Yale, earning a B.A. with Distinction in Economics and Psychology in 2019. While at Yale, she was active in both campus leadership and the performing arts, starring in operas, musicals and plays, co-founding the university’s first Indian classical dance group, and leading the South Asian Society. She received the V. Browne Irish Prize at Silliman College for excellence in and contribution to the nurturing and flourishing of the performing arts in the college and the university.
After Yale, Ipsitaa completed an MSc in Behavioral Science at the London School of Economics, where her dissertation examined how engagement in the arts shapes life satisfaction. She has spent the last four years working as a Behavioral Scientist across global development, health, and consumer behavior, with organizations including UNICEF, The Gates Foundation, and The World Bank.
Since making her music debut in 2020, Ipsitaa has simultaneously built a multilingual recording career, amassing over 330 million views on her music videos and over 40 million streams of her songs on Spotify. Her newest music video, Burn It Down, explores patriarchal systems and gender inequality through music and storytelling. She has just finished filming for her acting debut in a Bollywood movie, and is currently based in Mumbai, where she is expanding her career across music and cinema.
Below, Ipsitaa shares her favorite places on campus and around New Haven and how Yale helped shape the person she is today.
Why Yale?
Yale was always my dream school. In high school, I used to daydream about taking classes with professors whose work had shaped the foundations of psychology and economics, while also immersing myself in its extraordinary artistic life. I'd spend hours watching clips of Yale’s a cappella groups, drama productions, and dance performances, imagining what it would be like to be part of that world. It still feels surreal that I eventually got to live it. Yale really was my first dream come true.
What is your most enduring memory of your time at Yale?
A normal day on campus probably holds my most enduring memories of Yale. Hurried breakfasts in the Silliman dining hall, rushing from class to class, planning events for my extracurriculars, making time for office hours with professors (some still faintly anxiety-inducing to remember, others now wrapped in nostalgia). Long nights in the Sterling Library, heart-to-hearts over chai with friends in the AACC kitchen or coffee at the Acorn, and quiet moments sprawled across the courtyards that made campus feel like home. Only in retrospect do I realize how full and productive those bright college years were. I miss them deeply.
What is the biggest lesson you learned during your time at Yale and how does that shape who you are today?
The biggest lesson I learned at Yale came from a Positive Psychology class: that happiness is not something waiting for you at a future destination, but a choice and a practice you return to every day. That idea has stayed with me ever since. It influences how I approach both life and work: I try to build gratitude into my daily life, to create systems and environments that support both meaningful work and real rest, and to stay connected to purpose so that ambition feels expansive rather than draining.
Professor Laurie Santos’s work was an important part of shaping that understanding for me, and having her as my mentor and Head of College at Silliman made that lesson feel even more alive and tangible.
How did your time at Yale shape your identity?
Yale helped me realize that I did not have to fit into one box. I could be intellectually serious and deeply creative at the same time, and that has shaped my identity ever since.
What does belonging mean to you and how did you find a sense of belonging at Yale and after?
Belonging is not the erasure of difference. It's about bringing one’s own distinctiveness to a shared creation and, in doing so, enriching it with more color, texture, and life. At Yale, whether in performances or research groups, I felt that individuality was never separate from the collective.
When people build something together, some part of the self inevitably lives on in the creation.
How have you stayed engaged with the Yale community since graduating?
Through friendships that have lasted over a decade now, my fifth-year reunion, and the occasional Yale Club dinners and holiday gatherings in both London and Mumbai.
What advice do you wish you heard during your time at Yale?
I wish we heard more about how different life after Yale can feel. The energy, intensity, and sense of possibility on campus are so singular that the transition into the real world can be more disorienting than one expects. I also wish we heard more about non-traditional paths people take after Yale.
What were your favorite spaces at Yale or in New Haven? Why?
A few of my favorite spaces were the libraries: the Divinity Library, the Haas Arts Library, the J. E. Library, the Law Library, the Music Library, and several of the reading rooms within Sterling. I suppose I was a huge nerd, but each of them had its own atmosphere, and I loved the feeling of moving between different intellectual worlds depending on where I was working.
I also loved the Good Life Center and the gym in Silliman, the dance studios in Stiles and Morse, and the dining halls in the two new residential colleges. Around New Haven, I spent a lot of time at Blue State Coffee on Wall Street, which has sadly since closed, as well as Claire’s Corner Copia and Mamoun’s Falafel. I was vegan during my time at Yale, and those places always took such good care of me.
What aspects of Yale do you feel like you talk about most often to people who didn’t go to school here? Why?
What I probably talk about most is the range of opportunities Yale gave me.
I often speak about the friends I made there, many of whom remain among the most important people in my life, and about how formative it was to be in a place where intellectual, artistic, and personal growth all felt equally possible.
I also talk a great deal about the mentors I found at Yale, who helped me navigate early adulthood, being away from home, and the challenge of figuring out who I wanted to become. What made Yale so distinctive to me was not just the excellence of the place, but the sense that so many doors were open if you were willing to walk through them.
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