Amanda L. Culp is a scholar, theater artist, and performance historian who specializes in Sanskrit drama, contemporary Indian theater, and intercultural dramaturgy. Her research centers on issues of translation and adaptation across divergent eras, languages, cultural frameworks, and performance medias. Her writing on Sanskrit theater in performance has been published in Theatre Journal, Asian Theatre Journal, the Routledge Companion to Scenography, and the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Literature, and she has presented her research at the Association for Asian Performance, the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, the Annual Conference on South Asia in Madison, the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists, and at the American Society for Theatre Research. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Drama at Vassar College, and has taught at the Hutchins School at Sonoma State University, and Columbia University.

As a production 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 has worked with One Year Lease Theater Company in New York City and Papingo, Greece; is a founding member of The Living Room – a feminist theater ensemble dedicated to making new plays about the contemporary American female; and frequently collaborates with director Nikhil Mehta, both at Black Box Okhla in New Delhi and in New York. She has recently consulted for Payal Kadakia on a new piece for her Los Angeles-based dance company, Sa.

Education

Ph.D., Columbia University, Theater, 2018

M.A.R., Yale University, Asian Religion, 2012

B.A., Vassar College, Drama and Asian Studies, 2009