2023-2024 Residency: Sri Vamsi Matta

Nisha Abdulla is a Bangalore-based theatremaker practicing as playwright, director, dramaturg, and educator. Her anti-oppressive arts practice places care, curiosity, and community at the core of the creation process. She is Artistic Director of Qabila, where her work centers new writing around lived experience and the dissenting imagination. Nisha is a founder member of OffStream, an artist collective that makes and enables creative projects around anti-caste advocacy. Nisha also teaches at schools and universities, most recently at Azim Premji University (Bangalore) and NALSAR (Hyderabad).

Lakshmana, founding member of Jangama Collective, is an actor, director, poet, and performance educator from Karnataka, India. He graduated from the Intercultural Theatre Institute Singapore in 2018 and from Ninasam Theatre Institute in 2012. Lakshman has been exploring questions around Dalit aesthetics in performance, and his two recent plays, We the People of India and Daklakatha Devikavya, explore intersecting questions about Dalit political modernity and cultural memory.

Afsar Mohammad is an acclaimed South Asianist working on the Hindu-Muslim relations in South India. His new book “Remaking History: 1948 Police Action and the Muslims of Hyderabad” (Cambridge University Press, 2023) focuses on the post-Partition developments in Hyderabad, India. Afsar explores the question of Muslim being and belonging in the wake of the turbulent consequences of the police action. His previous book “The Festival of Pirs: Popular Islam and Shared Devotion in South India,” (Oxford University press, 2013) was also well-received for its ethnography and theorization of local Islam. Now teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, Afsar has also received many prestigious awards for his creative writing in Telugu and English.

Dr. Brahma Prakash is a writer, cultural theorist and an Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is the author of critically acclaimed book, Cultural Labour: Conceptualizing the ‘Folk Performance’ in India (Oxford University Press, 2019) and Body on the Barricades: Life, Art and Resistance in Contemporary India (LeftWord 2023). He has also published in various research journals, including Asian Theatre Journal, Performance Research, Theatre Research International, Economic and Political Weekly and others. He was a fellow at the South Asia Institute at Heidelberg University, Germany (2021) and the CRASSH at Cambridge University, UK (2018-19). His popular columns on art, culture and politics frequently appear in Scroll, Wire, Outlook, Newsminute, Indian Cultural Forum and other media platforms. His opinions have also appeared in the BBC, Aljazeera, New Arab, Print and other popular podcasts in Hindi and English.

Rahee Punyashloka is an artist, writer, researcher, and experimental filmmaker based out of Bhubaneswar and New Delhi. Working across disciplines, he seeks to illuminate the vastly unrepresented/underrepresented artistic history of the anti-caste struggle and the Dalit identity. He tries to create online interventions around the same under the moniker “artedkar.” His works have been exhibited in numerous venues including International Film Festival Rotterdam; Athens Video Art Festival; Tribeca Film Festival (New York); ARKIPEL (Jakarta); Ishara Art Foundation (Dubai); KHOJ (New Delhi); Museum of Art and Photography (Bangalore); Arts House (Melbourne), among others. His solo show, fieldnotes from begumpura, is currently on show at Pulp Society, New Delhi.

Shrujana N Shridhar is an artist and illustrator based in Mumbai. Her practice examines the intersection of caste, gender, and capitalism. It honours the resilience of communities that fought caste and gender oppressions for centuries. The detailed and lively compositions in her works are inspired by the idea of community as safe spaces within the anti-caste movement. She employs vivid colour palettes to create tactile and organic perceptions. Her works have been published in magazines in India and abroad. Shrujana has written and illustrated children’s books. She runs the Dalit Panther Archive, digitizing and archiving Little Magazines and literature published by the members of the Dalit Panther movement. She is a co-founder of Maveli Nadu Collective, an anti-caste publication. She has received the SSAF–AAA Research Grant for Archiving Histories of Art, Ideas, and Visual Culture in 2019. Her works have been exhibited at Clark House Initiative, Mumbai, The Showroom, London, China Residencies at Centre for Media at Risk at the University of Pennsylvania, and Arts House, Melbourne. IG: @srujangatha

Maulikraj Shrimali is a dramatist, director, scholar, and Dalit artist-activist from India. He established the ‘Whistle Blower Theater Group’, an anti-caste theater troupe that uses a range of dramatic approaches to examine social and political issues in India.

He has written, directed, and performed plays that deal with issues including caste and gender inequality, communal violence, as well as rights of tribal communities for land, water, forests, and identity. He earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from H K Arts College, a master’s degree in development communication from the State University of Gujarat, and an MPhil in Diaspora studies from the Central University of Gujarat. His main areas of study are the theater techniques and educational strategies employed by the caste-oppressed people of South Asia.

He is looking at anti-caste and anti-race performances, diaspora theater communities, and protest arts to better understand the global oppressed theater movement. Caste studies, practice-based action research, social change and activism, Diaspora studies, Indigenous studies, Development Communication Studies, autoethnography, and self-transformation are some of his areas of interest. He is also a co-founder and editorial director of the anti-caste Indian publication firm “Lokvacha Publication.” He has also received a Mellon Cluster Fellowship to study “Comparative Race and Diaspora Studies.