Anuja Ghosalkar is the founder of Drama Queen, a documentary theatre company in Bangalore. Through Drama Queen, she is evolving a unique form of Documentary theatre in India. The focus of her theatre practice is undocumented narratives, archival absences and gender. Research, oral history and iterations around form and process are critical to her performance and pedagogical work.
Drama Queen’s debut show Lady Anandi has traveled extensively across India and was written while she was an artist-in-residence at Art Lab Gnesta, Sweden. Her newest performance, The Reading Room blurs the boundary between audience and performer, where 10 strangers read personal letters alongside public ones.
She is visiting faculty at Srishti Institute of Art Design & Technology, Mount Carmel College working with students on research-based performance. Recently, for Srishti she conceived a site specific, performance at Cubbon Park Metro Station called Dream Walkers. She regularly conducts workshops at Rangashankara and Jagriti on Documentary theatre for children and young adults. She taught cinema in Bombay for over five years at St. Xavier’s, Wilson & K.C. College.
In the past, as an actor, Anuja has worked with Atul Kumar, Abhishek Majumdar, Kirtana Kumar and Arundhati Raja.
As a film researcher she worked for a book— by Rosie Thomas published by Orient Blackswan, for a National award winning film by Ashim Ahluwalia (Miss Lovely) and as a Sarai fellow she documented the oral narratives of her grandfather, the oldest living make-up artist, that resulted in the project titled: papaajoba.
She has been a curator and programmer for film festivals like Experimenta, Made By Women and Tri- Continental Human Rights Festival. She writes extensively on theatre and film for publications like Art India, Indian Cultural Forum, Deep Focus, Ladies Finger, Hakara, Scroll, Bioscope-Journal for South Asian Screen Studies.
She was a programming officer at India Foundation for the Arts (2008-13) and is an Art Think South Asia Fellow (2017-18)
She is the co-curator for Asia’s first festival on Documentary theatre, Staged Realities 2020.