AHON GOOPTU

Ahon Gooptu is an actor, playwright, collaborator, and scholar from Kolkata, India. In the last five years, he has found semblances of home in Iowa, Illinois, Washington, Connecticut, and Florida. He is drawn to interdisciplinary collaborations for telling queer, brown, and/or migrant narratives.

Ahon is Artistic Associate with Make/Shift Theatre Company, a Finalist for Definition Theatre's Amplify Series Two (2022), and inaugural recipient of the Sandy Moffett Award for Practice in Theatre and Dance (2021). Ahon has previously worked with the Steppenwolf, Taproot Theatre, Pickle Factory Dance Foundation, The Red Curtain International,  Farmers Alley Theatre, and the Kennedy Center. 

He has published a short collection of plays, All That Glistens (Grinnell College Press, 2021) and co-authored a chapter included in Shakespeare and Digital Pedagogy: Case Studies and Strategies (Bloomsbury, The Arden Shakespeare, 2022).

Ahon is currently completing his MA in Theatre and Performance Research at Florida State University. He holds a BA in Theatre and English from Grinnell College and has trained at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Theater Institute.

My work as a SCHOLAR focuses on the intersections of race, ethnicity, queer studies, and transnationalism, with a special emphasis on migrants of colour narratives in the U.S.

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As an EDUCATOR, I see theatre as a space to observe what I see and question what I know, investigate what I think could be and re-conceive what I think should be.

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As a THEATREMAKER creating and collaborating on new work, I find ways to consolidate the void that exists between my Indian traditions and contradicting U.S. American cultures.

Theatre, to me, is a space for my truth and perspective to find an expression in the hopes that it will speak to and move at least one person in the audience.