Shayok Misha Chowdhury is an Obie and Whiting Award winning writer, director, and performer, born in India, based in Brooklyn. His playwriting debut Public Obscenities, one of three finalists for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize, was a New York Times Critic’s Pick and hailed as “a literary marvel” in the New Yorker’s Best Theatre of 2023. Misha directed the play’s world premiere at Soho Rep, a co-production with NAATCO, as well as transfers to Woolly Mammoth and Theatre for a New Audience. He is the recipient of a Princess Grace Award, The Mark O’Donnell Prize, Drama Desk and Drama League nominations, a Jonathan Larson Grant, and the Relentless Award for his musical HOW THE WHITE GIRL GOT HER SPOTS AND OTHER 90s TRIVIA, created with composer Laura Grill Jaye. Misha is currently working on commissions from Playwrights Horizons and Manhattan Theatre Club and developing Rheology, a collaboration with his physicist mother, for which he was awarded an inaugural Sundance Asian American Fellowship. The concert-memoir, commissioned through HERE Arts Center, will premiere at the Bushwick Starr in 2025, with Ma-Yi Theatre. Other favorite collaborations include SPEECH (Philly Fringe) with Lightning Rod Special, Brother, Brother (New York Theatre Workshop) with Aleshea Harris, and MukhAgni (Under the Radar @ The Public Theater) with Kameron Neal. Misha was a soloist and collaborator on the Grammy-winning album Calling All Dawns.
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). He is 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, and Lantern Review. 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, Williams, and elsewhere.
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