Deepak Deb Memorial Panel Discussion
Deepak Deb: Humanitarian, Philanthropist, Thespian, Community Organizer, Plant-Lover, IT Leader, Friend, Dad, and Husband. Deepak-da, you are forever in our hearts.
TOPIC: Possibilities, challenges, and future of diasporic South Asian Theater in the US.
panelist:
Suman Mukhopadhyay is one of India’s leading theatre directors and has to his credit productions ranging from European drama to major adaptations of Bengali masterpieces, eight full length feature films, several documentaries, TV series, short films, and cine-plays. He won the National Award for Best Regional Film and several other national and inter-national theatre awards. Suman taught and directed plays at UC Berkeley, University of Toledo, Kalamazoo College, and Barnard College in the USA. He is currently working with Columbia University, New York on a Fulbright fellowship.
Rohina Malik is an award-winning Chicago playwright and screenwriter. She was born and raised in London, England, of South Asian heritage. Her critically acclaimed one-woman play UNVEILED has been presented at theaters across the United States and has had international presentations in Switzerland and South Africa. Malik’s plays THE MECCA TALES and YASMINA'S NECKLACE were both nominated for a Joseph Jefferson Award for Best New Play.
Neilesh Bose, Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair, University of Victoria, is a historian of modern South Asia with academic interests in colonial and post-colonial history, cultural history, and intellectual history, as well as active interests in literary and cultural criticism, theater, and performance studies. Neilesh has published extensively including “Beyond Bollywood and Broadway: Plays from the South Asian Diaspora”, and collaboratively convened a round table on Islam and contemporary theater in North America “The Dramaturgy of Political Violence: Performance, Representation, and Muslims in the Contemporary World,”. He has also jointly translated the first-ever English edition of Utpal Dutt’s Maanusher Adhikare (The Rights of Man) and Mir Musharraf Hussein’s Jamidar Darpan (The Landlord Mirror).
Aparna Pampi Das, is founder of In Divine Company, an activist multimedia contemporary temple dance theater collective. Pampi is a darker-skinned nonbinary second-genx casteD-Bengali culture worker who flourishes the intersection of healing and education and develops community-centered art that releases creative potential and drives collective change-making. Only recently it dawned on them that they have been developing a contemporary version of the natak - a musical dance theater form indigenous to South Asia.
Avishek Ganguly, Associate Professor, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) is an interdisciplinary scholar who works on the ethics and politics of translation, theater and performance, and contemporary literatures in English. Ganguly believes that interdisciplinary humanities should play a prominent role in shaping public life and policy conversations and continues to work with various art and cultural organizations in the area including the Wilbury Theatre Group and FringePVD: The Providence Fringe Festival, and Off-Kendrik.