Hometown:
Dates in Sitka:
Dipika Guha was born in Calcutta and raised in India, Russia, and the United Kingdom. She spent two months in Sitka through the Rasmuson Foundation Artist Residency Program, working on a new play, a television screenplay, and hosting readings and workshops while here. She studied English Literature at University College London, was a Frank Knox Fellow at Harvard University, and received her MFA from the Yale School of Drama under Paula Vogel.
Her plays include THE BETROTHED (Wellfleet Harbour Actors Theatre, Chester Theatre), PASSING (Risk is This Festival, Cutting Ball Theatre) and THE RULES (Superlab workshop Playwrights Horizons/Clubbed Thumb, Old Vic New Voices workshop) and HERCULINE and LOLA (Playwrights Foundation). New work has been developed at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, WordBRIDGE, New Century Theatre Company, the Culture Project and Tobacco Theatre (UK), among others. Residencies include Ucross Foundation, Djerassi Residents Artists Program, and SPACE at Ryder Farm. She is a Dramatists Guild Fellow, a Time Warner Fellow at the Women’s Project Playwrights Lab, an Affiliated Artist with New Georges, an Ars Nova Playgroup Alum, and an Alum of the Young Writers Program of the Royal Court Theatre.
Dipika’s HERCULINE and LOLA is still in progress. The play concerns two intersex characters: Herculine Barbin is a character based on a late 19th century diary that was recovered and published by Michel Foucault, and Lola is a contemporary intersex character of Dipika’s invention. She says, “The play is in three parts. RED bounces back and forth between the 19th century and today and features a large array of characters in different locations, WHITE is set entirely in one white room in La Rochelle and charts the love affair between Herculine and her lover Sara and BLUE is where the two stories (almost) come together.” Dipika also has a few new projects in mind, one of which is the book for a musical that she plans to eventually complete with composer Marisa Michelson. “I have a seedling idea,” Dipika says, “about immaculate conception and a family of women in New Orleans who seem to be cursed with it.” She will be at work on these and other projects during her time in Sitka.
She lives in New York.
Dipika is here in Sitka through the generous support and facilitation of the Rasmuson Foundation’s Artist In Residence Program.