Leela Singh hails from Columbus, Ohio as a recent graduate in Theater and South Asian Studies from The Ohio State University. Although her time as a Literary Fellow at Steppenwolf will be her first professional venture, she spent her undergraduate years dramaturging for productions of The Visit by Friedrich Durrenmatt and the delightful cult musical Zombie Prom, as well as exploring devised performance pieces through Ohio State’s student-run Lab Series.

During her final year at Ohio State Leela successfully defended a thesis based on independent research she conducted over the course of ten weeks in the Indian city of Jaipur, exploring the interactions between folk performers in the area and the increasingly corporatized tourist industry. Using her avid and still very active interest in performance studies, Leela gained inspiration from texts by Judith Butler, Partha Chatterjee, and David Harvey in crafting a thesis that was part performative narration and part scholarly ethnography, in an attempt to explore how her research was affected by operating as the the Western "Other" while still identifying with her Indian heritage.

As a biracial Asian-American, Leela continues to have a vested interest in issues of diversity and representation across American theater, and is very much looking forward to exploring questions arising from that subject with her fellow apprentices during her time at Steppenwolf.

Leela hopes to work as a dramaturg in Chicago, helping companies to develop their work through "unconventional" perspectives--for example, how can Nicki Minaj bring us into a discussion of representations of femininity or direct challenges to the stereotype of the "feminine"? How can the oil industry relate to depictions of heterosexual male violence onstage? What does theater look like when it is purely for the audience? Does it look closer to the "mainstream"? Is that bad?

When my bio is more impressive I'm sure it will be shorter.