ABSTRACT
Meena Natarajan is a playwright and director and the Executive and Literary Director of Pangea World Theater, a progressive, international ensemble space for arts and dialogue. She has led the theater’s growth since its founding in 1995. As a playwright, her scripts have been professionally produced both in India and the U.S. She adapted Farid Ud-din Attar’s 12th-century poem, Conference of the Birds, into a dramatic script for Pangea World Theater for its founding production in 1996 and again in 2009 and 2016. A staged reading of the play was produced by Silk Road Theatre in Chicago in 2013. An excerpt of her play Without My Country received a reading at the Women Playwrights International Festival in Greece in 2000. Her production, Partitions, dealing with the anti-Sikh riots in the ‘80s and the partition of India in 1947, performed as part of the Playwrights Center’s New Stage Directions Series in Minneapolis in April 2002. Other plays include: The Inner World, based on 2000-year-old Tamil poems of love and war, Rashomon based on Akutagawa’s short stories with playwright Luu Pham, Etchings In the Sand, with choreographer Ananya Chatterjea and plays commissioned by the Advocates of Human Rights, Amnesty International and Praxis International. Meena received a Twin Cities International Citizen’s Award in 2001 for her work in Pangea. Her work From The Ashes toured to the first National Asian-American Theatre Festival in New York, 2007. She was commissioned to write a play, No Expiration Date, on Aging, Sexuality, and Mindfulness by the Program of Human Sexuality at the University of Minnesota. She has been awarded grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board, Theatre Communications Group, and Playwrights Center. Meena was awarded the Visionary Award for mid-career leaders from the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits in 2013.
