Karen's story

Karen D’Mello is a theatre maker and educator from Bangalore. She is a co-founder of KathaSiyah and Same Same.

KathaSiyah is a Bangalore based theatre group; their work includes theatre productions and multimedia projects that focus on perspectives from the margins, with a deliberate re-centring around gender issues. Same Same is an international, interdisciplinary collective that was formed when the participants met at Goldsmiths, University of London. This collaborative group is dedicated to making performances that speak across cultural divides. Karen also works as a drama educator with children and young adults. Before embarking on a career in theatre, Karen studied engineering, and she has also worked in the IT industry and in advertising

CWIT enabled me to learn with and from the community of fellow artists, through collaborations across disciplines and cultures. In doing so, it introduced me to new forms and contexts. These learnings have taken me a step further in making collaborative and interdisciplinary work, which I always aspired to do but didn’t have the know-how about.

The CWIT experience was important for Karen because it allowed her the opportunity to experiment “it gave me the time and space to put into practice some of the tools and insights I picked up at Goldsmiths during classroom sessions, discussions, watching performances, reading theoretical texts, and living in London. And then to consider how this can be applied to and be usefully reframed for my own context – both politically and socially.”

Final MA show: drop dead gorgeous is a devised theatre piece which explores the expectations of female bodies in public space.

This performance was the final show as part of the MA in Performance Making programme that Karen was engaged with, at Goldsmiths. Subsequently the show was presented at a festival of international and diasporic art in Peckham, London and the VAULT Festival 2020 where it was nominated for the Origins Award and Innovation Award, and selected for Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2020 (now postponed to 2021)

Arts, ScholarshipM BoardmanOctober 26, 2020