Kayhan Irani is an Emmy-award winning writer, a cultural activist and a Theater of the Oppressed trainer. She works internationally and in the U.S. using theater and story-based strategies for organizing, engagement and education.
Her one-woman show We’ve Come Undone toured nationally and internationally, telling stories of Arab, South Asian and Muslim-American women in the wake of 9/11. She was named a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Researcher to develop her play Tree of Seeds in India. In 2016, Irani was one of ten artists named as an Obama White House Champion of Change for her storytelling work.
In 2010 Irani won a New York Emmy award for best writing for We Are New York, a nine-episode broadcast TV drama (WNYC-TV) used as an English language and civic engagement tool for immigrant New Yorkers. She created a linked, community-based conversation initiative that brought thousands of immigrants, throughout the five boroughs, together to practice English in volunteer-led conversation groups that continue to this day.
Her published work includes a volume of essays, Telling Stories to Change the World: Global Voices on the Power of Narrative to Build Community and Make Social Justice Claims (Routledge, 2008) and a chapter in Culturally Relevant Arts Education for Social Justice: A Way Out of No Way (Routledge, 2015). Irani’s work has been written about in such publications as The New York Times, Colorlines Magazine, the New York Daily News and The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.
Project Description: Kayhan Irani will develop There is a Portal, a program that deepens and develops the political voice and interconnectivity of marginalized youth through a performance-workshop series and pedagogical experiments.
The series consists of four separate, but interrelated, performance-workshops, with the same group of students, to ignite and foster claims for equal rights and equal treatment. Participants will analyze how the personal struggle is tied into the political one, look closely at what needs mending and have the opportunity to embody new ways of moving in their bodies as rehearsal for their own interventions. Over the four sessions, students will move towards visions of engagement and mobilization (individually or collectively). Performance-workshops will be presented in universities, schools, community centers and movement spaces that serve immigrant and working class youth.
Photo by DelPazzo Studios.