Meena Natarajan

Meena Natarajan is a playwright and director and the Artistic and Executive Director of Pangea World Theater, an international ensemble space that creates at the intersection of art, equity and social justice. Meena has co-curated and designed many of Pangea World Theater’s professional and community-based programs. She has written at least ten full-length works for Pangea, ranging from adaptations of poetry and mythology to original works dealing with war, spirituality, personal and collective memory. Her play, Etchings in the Sand co-created with dancer Ananya Chattterjea has been published by Routledge in a volume called Contemporary Plays by Women of Color: The Second Edition. Meena leads ensemble-based processes in Pangea that lead to works produced for the stage. She has also directed and dramaturged several original theater and performance art pieces. She is currently on the board of the National Performance Network, Longfellow Rising and the Loft. She recently collaborated with artist Chrissie Orr to create a project called Seed Syllables facilitating dialogues with 32 community artists and cultural activists across the U.S. and Canada to offer a composite portrait of life in the quadruple pandemic of virus, racial violence, economic meltdown, and climate crisis. Seed Syllables premiered as an incantatory participatory performance in June 2023 in Santa Fe, New Mexico.