Zuleikha Chaudhuri

Zuleikha Chaudhari is an Indian theatre director and lighting designer from New Delhi, India. Her family background consists of some prominent figures in the theatre industry, her grandfather Ebrahim Alkazi is an eminent Indian theatre director and her father Amal Allana Amal Allana is an Indian theatre director, scenic >> Read More... is a theatre director and former Chairperson of the National School of drama in New Delhi. She graduated with a Theatre directing and light design a major at the Bennington College in Vermont, USA in 1995 and studied at the Motley Theatre Design School in London. She was married to stage actor Manish Choudhary Manish Chaudhary is an eminent Indian film and tel >> Read More... , with whom she collaborated in many projects. They had a group together called the ‘Performers at Work’ established in 1997 that worked on translation of text to visuals.

The group has produced several projects such as Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, Orlando by Virginia Woolf and their original The Mahabharata Project. In her work, she tries to create a narrative between the performer and the space, she says “It is an exploration of space and the role that the space plays in the construction and experience of narratives-whether it is the space of the human body or the space of the place within which the performance is happening.”

Her first debut in primary theatre production was Roland Schimmelpfennig’s Arabian Night. It was an installation specific to site that was experimental and the performance was supported by Max Mueller Bhavan, associated with Khoj International Artist’s Association. The production initiated in Khoj Studios in 2006 in New Delhi and was later presented in Seoul Performing Arts festival in 2007. Her site-specific installation continued and her next project was based on a short story written by Haruki Murakami ‘On Seeing’ in 2008 which was also presented in Khoj Studios, New Delhi. Another one of her projects called ‘Some Stage Directions for Henrik Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman’ which was commissioned for the Delhi Ibsen Festival in 2009, followed by ‘Propositions: On Text and Space,’ ‘Propositions: On Text and Space II’ opened at Project 88 in Mumbai, then ‘Seen at Secunderabad’ which was a collaboration with Raqs Media Collective and premiered at Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussel, 2011.

She is a visiting faculty at the Dramatic Art and Design Academy in New Delhi. She recieved many awards including Sangeet Natak Academy Award, Yuva Puraskar Award in 2007, The Rotary Club Youth Excellence Award for Theatre in 1999, and the Charles Wallace India Trust Award in 2001 and 2002. She received a grant to produce an installation called ‘Relocate’ that explores text, spatial arrangement, light, video, sound and layering. She is also the director of Alkazi Theatre Archives at The Alkazi Foundation for the Arts in New Delhi. She is also a member of the Khoj International Artists Association in the Advisory Artists group since 2007 and was invited as a jury member to the Zurcher Theatre Spektakel.