Riti Sachdeva

Interweaving the personal, political, and arcane, Riti Sachdeva has crafted the singular Indo-Gothic sensibility of her work over 25 years of creating performance. Riti’s early exposure to Hindu mythology woke her fascination of the mystical and mysterious. She grew up in a multiracial, multilingual, working class ‘hood in Cambridge, MA and expresses this unique American experience in the worlds of her performances and scripts.

Riti’s work has been developed or produced by: NYU, Playwrights’ Center, Dramatists Guild, Public Theater, WP Theater, Ingram New Works Lab, New Georges, Phoenix Theater, Working Theater, Centerstage, National New Play Network, U Hawai’i, Middle Tennessee SU, and Lincoln Center Director’s Lab. She is recipient of the Thom Thomas playwriting award for Welcome to the Taj Palace (motel), the Kennedy Center ACTF Quest for Peace award and the Sultan Padamsee award for her play Parts of Parts & Stitches and a Theater Communications Group/Mellon Foundation grant to adapt her play Suicide Seed to the kathakali dance-theatre form. Her play The Rug Dealer made the Kilroys List. Currently, Riti is developing her first TV series, THE 505, for which she was selected as Berlinale Film Festival fellow; and a new screenplay, Suicide Seed, based on her eco thriller stage play. She continues to collaborate with singer/percussionist Caro Acuña and various performers to cultivate the multi-hyphenate Flamenco Song of Living and Dying.

Acting/performance highlights include work with HBO, Disney, lots of cool indie films, National Hispanic Cultural Center, PopUp Theatrics, Honest Accomplice Theater and an Outstanding One Act award from Planet Connections for her performance art show, Scene/Unseen. 

As a cultural worker, Riti was a sexuality educator with South Asian Youth Action (SAYA) in Queens, NY; 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/racial justice- and the arts – to build intergenerational, cross cultural, transnational communities of disciplined creation and joyful liberation.