As a performance maker and cultural worker, Riti Sachdeva has been creating art in some shape, pattern, or rhythm for over twenty-five years. Incorporating text, installation, song, and dance into her writing and performance, she straddles the practices and conventions of traditional U.S. theater, performance art, and international approaches to theater. Interweaving the personal, political, and arcane, she has crafted the singular Indo-Gothic aesthetic of her work. 

Playwriting fellowships include: the Dramatists Guild Fund, which awarded her the 2019 Thom Thomas playwriting award; The Public Theater’s EWG; WP Theater Lab; Ingram New Works Lab; and New Georges. She is recipient of the Kennedy Center ACTF Quest for Peace award and Sultan Padamsee award for her play Parts of Parts & Stitches and a Theater Communications Group/Mellon Foundation travel grant to begin adapting her play Suicide Seed to the kathakali dance-theater form. Her play The Rug Dealer made the 2016 Kilroys List. Additionally, plays have been developed by Phoenix Theater, Working Theater, CenterStage, The Civilians, the Playwrights’ Center, NNPN, U of Hawai’i, and Lincoln Center Director’s Lab. 

Acting/performance highlights include work with National Hispanic Cultural Center, PopUp Theatrics, Honest Accomplice, HBO, Disney, lots of cool indie films, and an Outstanding One Act award from Planet Connections for her performance art show Scene/Unseen. She continues to develop her solo show BEHIND EVERY FAVORITE SONG IS AN UNTOLD WOMAN, part cabaret, part memoir, part mythicism.

As a cultural worker, Riti was a sexuality educator with South Asian Youth Action (SAYA) in Queens; a teaching artist and community organizer with Somos Los Otros and Cambio in Albuquerque; and a founding sister of South Asian Women for Action (SAWA) in Boston. Her cultural works activate the crossroads of solidarity; economic, gender, and racial justice; and the arts—with intergenerational, cross-cultural, transnational communities.

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