Shuktara Lal

Shuktara (she/her) works between therapeutic theatre and counselling, teaching and publishing. She lives in Kolkata, India, and has facilitated workshops extensively with NGOs, organizations, universities and schools. She also counsels privately and has been conducting sessions with individuals and couples for over a decade. She has taught courses in therapeutic theatre at universities including the Asian University for Women (Chattogram/Chittagong, Bangladesh). At present she is particularly interested in grief, mourning, self and collective reflection and transience, and she has been drawing on related ideas in The Nāṭyaśāstra to design sessions.

Shuktara has directed several performances for the stage. She tends to gravitate towards working with different languages and her full-length ventures include a trilingual (English, Bangla, Hindi) production of Neil Bartlett’s stage adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations/Bodo Asha/Badi Ashayein and a bilingual adaptation (Bangla and English) of Charlotte Keatley’s My Mother Said I Never Should / Ma Bolechhe Korishna. 

She teaches drama to 8-19 year olds at The Calcutta School of Music. Outside of theatre, she writes, and works with the publishing house, Writers Workshop.