Shayok Misha Chowdhury is a many-tentacled writer and director, born in India, based in Brooklyn. He recently received an Obie Award for directing the world premiere of his playwriting debut, Public Obscenities, at Soho Rep, a co-production with the National Asian American Theatre Company. The “extraordinary bilingual drama” was a New York Times Critic's Pick and hailed as a “literary marvel” and “complexly layered masterwork” by The New Yorker. The play had encore runs at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company and Theatre for a New Audience. Misha is also the recipient of a Princess Grace Award, The Mark O’Donnell Prize, Drama Desk and Drama League nominations, and a Jonathan Larson Grant for his body of work writing musicals with composer Laura Grill Jaye. The duo’s most recent collaboration, How the White Girl Got Her Spots and Other 90s Trivia, was awarded the 2022 Relentless Award. Misha collaborated on the Grammy-winning album Calling All Dawns. Other favorite collaborations: Brother, Brother (New York Theatre Workshop) with Aleshea Harris; SPEECH (Philly Fringe) with Lightning Rod Special; MukhAgni (Under the Radar @ The Public Theater) with Kameron Neal. Misha is currently working on commissions from Playwrights Horizons and the Manhattan Theatre Club. As a Resident Artist @ HERE Arts Center, he is developing Rheology, a collaboration with his physicist mother, which was awarded an inaugural Sundance Asian American Fellowship. The piece will premiere at The Bushwick Starr in 2025, a co-production with HERE and Ma-Yi Theater Company.

Misha is the creator of VICHITRA, a series of sound-driven, cinematic experiments, including Englandbashi (Ann Arbor Film Festival); The Other Other (Ars Nova); An Anthology of Queer Dreams (Audio Unbound Award finalist); and In Order to Become (The Bushwick Starr). Misha is also an alumnus of New York Theatre Workshop’s 2050 Fellowship, The Public Theater’s Devised Theater Working Group, Ars Nova’s Makers Lab, New York Stage and Film Nexus, the Sundance Art of Practice Fellowship, BRIClab, Drama League’s Next Stage Residency, and Soho Rep’s Project Number One and Writer Director Lab.

A NYSCA/NYFA, Fulbright, and Kundiman fellow in poetry, Misha has been published in The Cincinnati Review, TriQuarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Portland Review, Asian American Literary Review, Lantern Review and elsewhere. Residencies: Macdowell, Hermitage Artist Retreat, Rhinebeck Writers Retreat, Ucross, SPACE on Ryder Farm, Mercury Store.

Misha received his Bachelors in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity under the mentorship of Maestra Cherríe Moraga at Stanford University, his Master of Fine Arts in Directing Theater at Columbia University under Anne Bogart, Brian Kulick, and Greg Mosher, and studied Lecoq-based physical theater at the London International School of Performing Arts. He has taught and directed at Stanford, Brown, NYU, CalArts, Fordham, Syracuse, UArts, Hunter College, CMU, and Williams.