Director of Pangea World Theater in Minneapolis, a progressive, international ensemble space for theater and dialogue. She has led Pangea’s growth since its founding in 1995. Meena’s scripts have been professionally produced both in the U.S. and India. She is currently on the boards of the National Performance Network, the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists and is a National Theater Projects Advisorat New England Foundation of the Arts. Meena is also a past President of Women Playwrights International.

Prismatic is thrilled to have Meena join us in Halifax and to be able to count our Festival in the many organizations and events that have benefited from her skill and artistry. Meena will be leading two workshops at this year’s Prismatic:

Workshop 1 – Activate Equity: Directing & Ensemble Creation 

This experiential, practice-based session will engage your bodies, as well as your minds, and creative spirits. With exercises coming out of the National Institute for Directing & Ensemble Creation co-led by Pangea World Theater, you will explore the challenges of discussing cultural and gender equity in our field, and the practices emerging from artists of color, diasporic artists and women directors working in theater today. The workshop will take a fun, participatory approach to articulating aesthetic differences, and the creative conflicts that ensembles and directors sometimes face in the process of devising original work as a starting point for dialogue and exploration, leading to an embodied understanding of how we can activate equity and social justice practices in the field of theatre.

Workshop 2 – Comparative Practice: Eastern and Western Theater and Aesthetics

This workshop will compare Bharatha’s Natya Shastra from India and Aristotle’s Poetics in a comparative session of practices from non-western theater and western theater. This will include embodied practice as well as a generative discussion of aesthetics and will aid in a wider engagement of differences and similarities in set design, narrative structure, story-telling methodologies and performance styles.