Sharmistha Saha is assistant professor of Performance Studies at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai. She completed her PhD from the Department of Philosophy and Humanities at the Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany. Erasmus Mundus followed by the German Research Foundation (DFG) funded her doctoral study. Later, she was a DFG postdoctoral fellow at Dahlem Research School, Berlin, Germany. She has been a UGC Junior Research Fellow at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. In the past she has been a Becas MAEC-AECID fellow at the Universidad de Granada, Spain. Her research interests include theatre historiography, performance philosophy, colonial theatre, theories of acting, aesthetics and politics, archive and the arts and critical theory. She is the author of Theatre and National Identity in Colonial India: Formation of a community through cultural practice (Springer/Aakar, 2017). Sharmistha is also a theatre practitioner and some of her directorial work includes ‘Playing to Bombay’ co-created with Sunil Shanbag, ‘Her Letters’ commissioned by the Tagore Centre in Berlin, ‘Romeo Ravidas aur Juliet Devi’ amongst others. She most recently was part of the international inter-medial project ‘Elephants in Rooms’ facilitated by the German-UK based Gobs Squad Arts Collective. She has closely worked with the theatre stalwart Eugenio Barba and his company Odin Teatret in Denmark.
During her Fulbright-Nehru Research Fellowship Sharmistha will be working on the project ‘Community identity, cultural performance and value: politics of intercultural exchange between the ‘west’ and postcolonial India’ at the TISCH School of the Arts, New York University. Her work will focus on politics of community identity, cultural performances as inheritance and its associated value in the context of ‘intercultural theatre’.