Amanda Culp

Assistant Professor of Drama
Amanda Culp wearing a black shirt and green necklace strung with multi-sized green circles.

Dr. Amanda Culp is a dramaturg and performance historian who specializes in the theatrical afterlives of Sanskrit drama. Her teaching and research interests include: intercultural dramaturgy; translation and adaptation studies; South Asian theater and performance; decolonizing theater studies; performance theory; and the intersections of theater, ritual, and religion. Her book project, Making Performance History: Discovering Kalidasa’s Shakuntala on the Modern Global Stage, considers eight occasions of production across Europe and India from the late nineteenth century to the present that make the case for this Sanskrit play's contribution to modern theater aesthetics and practice in both localities. Her writing on Sanskrit theater in performance has been publisehd in Theatre JournalAsian Theatre JournalThe Routledge Companion to Scenography, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to World Literature, and in the volume Many Mahabharatas from SUNY Press. She currently serves as the Vice President of Conference Planning for the Association for Asian Performance.

As a dramaturg, Amanda works on a range of projects, from new scripts in development to adaptations of extant texts, to devised collaborations. She is especially interested in work that embraces and explores the challenges of theater as a local art form operating in a global cultural economy. She is a frequent collaborator with Nikhil Mehta, artistic director of Black Box Okhla in New Delhi, and a company member of One Year Lease Theater Company. She is also one of the program directors for One Year Lease's summer apprentice program, a two-month, three-country theater making journey that takes students from Nagano, Japan, to Karnataka in South India, to the Pindus Mountains of Northern Greece. 

MAR, Yale University; BA, Vassar College; MA, MPhil, PhD, Columbia University in the City of New York
At Vassar since 2020

Contact

845-437-5585
Vogelstein Center for Drama and Film
Box 434

Departments and Programs

Courses

Drama 221: Sources of World Drama Antiquity to the 17th Century
Drama 222: Sources of World Drama 1800s to the Present
Drama 239: Indian Performance Traditions
Drama 340: Artaud and his Legacy
Drama 232: Dramaturgy

In the Media

Photos

Download images for non-commercial use, photo credit required.