Amanda Culp

Dr. Amanda Culp is a dramaturg and performance historian who specializes in the theatrical afterlives of Sanskrit drama. Her teaching and research interests include: intercultural dramaturgy; translation and adaptation studies; South Asian theater and performance; decolonizing theater studies; performance theory; and the intersections of theater, ritual, and religion. Her book project, Making Performance History: Discovering Kalidasa’s Shakuntala on the Modern Global Stage, considers eight occasions of production across Europe and India from the late nineteenth century to the present that make the case for this Sanskrit play's contribution to modern theater aesthetics and practice in both localities. Her writing on Sanskrit theater in performance has been publisehd in Theatre Journal, Asian Theatre Journal, The Routledge Companion to Scenography, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to World Literature, and in the volume Many Mahabharatas from SUNY Press. She currently serves as the Vice President of Conference Planning for the Association for Asian Performance.

As a dramaturg, Amanda works on a range of projects, from new scripts in development to adaptations of extant texts, to devised collaborations. She is especially interested in work that embraces and explores the challenges of theater as a local art form operating in a global cultural economy. She is a frequent collaborator with Nikhil Mehta, artistic director of Black Box Okhla in New Delhi, and a company member of One Year Lease Theater Company. She is also one of the program directors for One Year Lease's summer apprentice program, a two-month, three-country theater making journey that takes students from Nagano, Japan, to Karnataka in South India, to the Pindus Mountains of Northern Greece.