Suhaila Meera

Suhaila Meera is a director, dramaturg, and PhD candidate in Stanford University’s Theater & Performance Studies department, also pursuing PhD minors in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Before graduate school, Suhaila worked at Teamwork Arts, Girls Write Now, and The Juilliard School. She holds a BA in History and Film from Cornell University and has studied acting with Barry John and at the Stella Adler Studio.

“Playing Children: Statelessness and the Performance of Childhood,” examines theatrical and cinematic portraits of young people navigating borders in South Asia and the Middle East. These artworks, I find, illustrate how the categories of performance, childhood, and the nation-state constrain while they come apart at the seams; that, like a child outgrowing their clothes, any imagination of the world as divided by national boundaries, by “their” children and “ours,” no longer fits.