British choreographer and dancer Akram Khan was born in 1974 in London to immigrant children from Bangladesh. At a very young age, he learnt to perform Kathak, a traditional Indian dance form. That dance, along with modern Western dance, forms the dual breeding ground for his work.

As an adolescent, he collaborated with Pandit Ravi Shankar in The Jungle Book and with Peter Brook in Mahabharata. He graduated from the Nothern School of Contemporary Dance in Leeds, where he received the highest grading ever for a Performing Arts degree. He collaborated with Jonathan Burrows and participated in P.A.R.T.S.'s X-Group project (Anne-Teresa De Keersmaeker's dance school), a support programme for young choreographers.