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Kavya Srinivasan and Rashmi

Kavya Srinivasan (she/they) is a writer, theatre-maker and storyteller. She has been on stage for the last fifteen years. She received a distinction in ATCL Diploma in Performance Arts from the Trinity College of London in 2021. Kavya has been training and working with Our Theatre Collective as a performer since 2020. As a playwright, she has written Aashi and Renu and co-written Monsters in the Dark. 

Kavya runs a weekly writing community called The Write Time, which meets every week for the last year, and supports a community of writers devoted to their craft. In her free time, she can be found reading, daydreaming and singing. 

 

Rashmi is a theatre director and facilitator. The intersection of Kannada and English theatre as well as that of playback and proscenium theatre is an area that she loves working with. She also has a background in psychology, which she often uses as a tool in playmaking. She is the artistic director of jijji productions, one of the co-founders of citylamps playback theatre and works as a corporate facilitator at Navgati.

She has directed two plays for the Rangashankara youth festival and was awarded the Gender Bender grant by Sandbox Collective and Max Muller Bhavan in 2020. She is currently engaged in creating written works for children with Bhasha Centre and KinderKatha (a book for teenagers on Gender Fluidity - Hudgana Hudgina? She has also performed in over 100 playback and improvisation performances. She is drawn to Gender, Mental health and Absurdism in performance.


 

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Nisha Abdulla

Nisha Abdulla is a Bangalore based theatre maker and educator. She is the Artistic Director of Qabila, where she makes work that centers new writing and the dissenting imagination. She is also co-founder of OffStream, a collective of artists that makes anti-caste work and enables community around it. Currently, she teaches performance making at Azim Premji University. And is knee deep in a new production as a grantee of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. 


 

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Abhimanyu Acharya

Abhimanyu Acharya is a multilingual playwright, short story writer, and translator working in English, Hindi, and Gujarati. He is currently based in Ontario, Canada. He has been a recipient of the Sanhita Manch Playwriting Award and the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar in 2020 and has been long-listed thrice for TOTO awards for creative writing in English. His plays have been performed in India and Canada in multiple cities. He recently submitted his doctoral dissertation at the University of Western Ontario on the aesthetics and politics of modern Gujarati Theatre in colonial India.

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Neeraja M R

Neeraja started her theatre journey in 2013 and co-founded an amateur theatre group called Tanariri with Pranav Patadiya. The group went on to produce plays such as Aditya Sudarshan’s ‘Green Room’, Badal Sircar’s ‘Evam Indrajit’, Manav Kaul’s ‘Aisa Kehte Hai’ and Manjula Padmanabhan’s ‘Lights out’. Neeraja has served the group in several roles as an actor, backstage crew and as a producer. ‘Nerkku Ner’ [Face to Face] is her first play, originally written in Malayalam and translated to English.

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Ranganath Shivamogga

Ranganath Shivamogga is a young practicing theatre and film artist from Karnataka. He studied theatre at Ninasam Theatre Institute in Heggodu, Karnataka and went on to participate in a young directors workshop organized by Ranga Shankara. He has directed seven plays: Asura, Alilu Ramayana, Oorubhanga, Bhagavadajjukeeyam, Guddadiligala Kathi, The Inspector General, Kempu May Dina and Koneya Uttara. He also wrote another play called GORUKANA 1974 Ahimso Parama Dharmah.

Apart from theatre, Ranganath has acted in Kannada web series and films such as Ramesh Suresh Madhumaga, Andondittu Kala, and Saptha Sagaradache Ello. He has also played the lead role in an anthology directed by Ananya Kasaravalli. 


 

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Anurupa Roy & Choiti Ghosh

Anurupa Roy is a puppeteer, puppet theatre director and puppet designer. She is the Founder and Managing Trustee of The Katkatha Puppet Arts Trust, a puppet theatre group based in Delhi, India since 1998.

She has a Diploma in Puppet theatre from DI (Dramatiska Institutet for Film, T.V , Drama and Radio) at The University of Stockholm, Sweden and has been trained in traditional glove puppetry, from La Scoula Della Guaratelle (School of Traditional Glove puppetry) in Naples, Italy under Bruno Leone in 2002.

Anurupa uses puppets to create visual narratives, works with communities using puppets to represent their own stories – including in conflict zones such as Kashmir. She is committed to the training of a future generation of professional puppeteers and facilitates regular workshops, organises masterclasess and in 2018 co-founded the Foundation Program the first professional puppet training program in India, under the aegis of UNIMA, the puppeteers union.

 

Choiti Ghosh is an Object Theatre artist, puppeteer, actor, singer, writer and artistic director of Mumbai-Delhi based object theatre company — Tram Arts Trust. Born into a family of theatre artists, she was initiated onto stage at a young age. 

She began her professional career in theatre in 1998. In 2010, following a brief professional workshop in Object Theatre under the Belgian Object Theatre artiste Agnés Limbos at the Institut International de la Marionnette (IIM), in Charleville Mezieres, France, Choiti has since dedicated her entire time to the practice and dissemination of Object Theatre in India.

Her artistic practice includes workshops with children and young people; workshops with teachers, and adults who work with children; training programmes for theatre artists and other arts based professionals; marginalised children and youth.


 

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Yugandhar Deshpande

Yugandhar Deshpande is a playwright, theatre curator and a screenwriter. The films he has written are Phool, LalitA and an untitled anthology directed by Vikram Phadnis. As a playwright, Yugandhar has written ‘Bail Melay’, for which he was nominated Best Playwright at Maharashtra Times Sanman in 2016, ‘Agdich Shunya’, ‘Absolute’ and others. He was also a Tendulkar-Dubey fellowship awardee in 2017. Currently, his new play ‘Sad Sakharam’ is under production.


 

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Manjima Chatterjee

Manjima Chatterjee is a drama explorer, teacher and occasional writer. Manjima read English at St Stephen's College, Delhi University, and Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics. She has a PG Diploma in Drama in Education (Theatre for Education and Social Transformation) under Maya Krishna Rao from Shiv Nadar University. Her articles have appeared in Arts Praxis, the Arts-in-Education journal of NYU Steinhardt, as well as in anthologies such as Nation, Nationalism and the Public Sphere (Sage; Banerjee and Ray, eds) and Projects/Processes, the Serendipity Arts Festival collection, and newspapers such as The Hindu, The Hindu Business Line, Education World and Hindustan Times. She was shortlisted for the BBC's International Radio Playwriting Competition and won The Hindu Metro Plus Playwright Award in 2013. Her book, Two Plays on Hunger, was published by Dhauli Press in 2018, and her play, The Mountain of Bones, was published in Creating a Profession: Disparate Voices of Indian Women Playwrights, an anthology of works by female Indian playwrights.

Manjima has conducted workshops on drama-in-education with teachers from schools across the country, including the DPS group of schools, and engages actively in conversations around the shape and future of arts education, in particular. She is the Central Arts Curriculum Lead at Shiv Nadar School, and also serves as Vice Principal at the Noida campus.


 

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Akash Mohimen

Akash Mohimen has been working as a writer since 2010. After his first play in 2010, ‘Might Mirembayanna’ and the ‘Prisoners of Peace’, he was selected for Writers' Bloc 3, where he developed ‘Mahua’, which opened in 2012. Since then he adapted Badal Sircar’s ‘Beyond the Land of Hattamala’, wrote ‘The Wall of Colours’ and ‘Under the Chestnut Tree’, the latter being shortlisted for the Hindu Metroplus Playwright Award, 2013. In 2017 he forayed into film by co-writing the screenplay for ‘Rukh’.

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Deepika Arwind

Deepika Arwind is a playwright, theatremaker and performer based in Bangalore, India. Her work has centered the female body on stage and off of it, and she continues to expand her practice in pursuit for a form that is both inventive and autonomous, working closely with sound and movement.

She has won and been nominated for several awards for her work. Her play Phantasmagoria (represented by Drei Masken Verlag) will be at the Kali Theatre as part of the International Festival of Plays. She is also part of the newly conceived performance International Conference of Insecurity (Gesnerallee, Zurich, Nov-Dec 2022), with a collective of performers from 8 countries. She will be a playwright-in-residence at the Residenztheater (Munich) in 2023. She will also be a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in 2023. She is the author of a book for young people Sarayu (2018) published by Le Cosmographie Editions.


 

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Neel Chaudhari

Neel Chaudhuri is a playwright and theatre director based in New Delhi. He is a founder member and former Artistic Director of The Tadpole Repertory. Neel studied history and film and spent a year working in Berlin before returning to India to work in the theatre. His plays include, Godspeed (TFA Award for Creative Writing 2009),Taramandal (The Hindu MetroPlus Playwright Award 2010), Still and Still Moving (developed in collaboration with the Royal Court Theatre, London) and Quicksand. Neel is a member of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab in New York, and PLUTO, a collective of international theatre directors. He teaches as visiting faculty at Ashoka University and Drama School Mumbai and works actively as a repertory mentor with Aagaaz Theatre Trust.