Biodata
Annesha is a reader, writer, and poet passionate about portraying diasporic communities and relationships. Born in New York and raised in Virginia, she often interrogates the difficulty in maneuvering colonisation, tokenism, and racism in white spaces, while also surviving patriarchy in South Asian communities. She just wrapped up an undergraduate thesis on rape and the reclamation of the self in South Asian texts by women/femmes, and to be honest, it took a lot out of her. In the aftermath she's been healing by reading incessantly, petting strangers' dogs, and learning and learning and learning. She believes in brown joy, her mother, and narrative. She will be an MFA candidate at the University of Michigan in the fall.
Cast member
Annesha
Bio coming soon.
Cast member
Asim
Benaifer is a storyteller, educator and clinical social worker. Her life's work is to create spaces where people can experience non-judgmental listening and connect deeply through the power of voice. She facilitates workshops and holds one-on-one spaces for anyone who wants to feel more connection and freedom in their lives. She is the co-creator of “Two Women Talking”, a personal storytelling performance that explores gender, identity, violence and tradition. Benaifer loves the sound of her voice, is growing to adore her own body for the first time and wants many more tattoos. She grew up between the sea-face of Bombay and the cliff sides of England and is one of ~190,000 Zoroastrians in the world, and is still pretty proud of it!
Benaifer performed in and co-directed YKR 2017 and is giddily excited to co-direct 2018.
Co-Director
Benaifer
Born and bred in Jersey, Dee aspires to bring new levels of queerness to everyday life, with the help of both their lady love and their feline life partner. Their passion lies in expanding models of gender, racial, and sexual identity and promoting more complex narratives of those intersections. They work with young people to support their self-education on major social issues, and to advance those young people’s advocacy efforts towards policy change in New York City. Much of their time is spent advocating and agitating for racial and queer justice through literature, education and social media. In their free time, they write fiction, tell really terrible dad jokes, fight dragons, and obey the whims of neighborhood cats. They want you to know that every body’s boundaries are sacrosanct--including and especially children’s.
Co-Director
Dee Mandiyan
Harii is a transfem organizer and artist born and bred in Queens, New York. Their work interrogates complicity, desire, and modes & methods of liberation situated in the hood. Grounded in their experience of mobilizing youth of color to reclaim public space and combat discriminatory surveillance and policing in NYC, Harii has been invited internationally to share their work and build community organizing strategies with activists working across all fronts. Currently, she is studying Gurmukhi, and serves at an organization downtown to empower young people to transform the world around them through political organizing. When Harii takes a pause from manifesting the world they'd like to occupy, you can find her on the beach, or in transit to somewhere new.
Cast member
Harii
hawa (ہوا) loves vulnerability, singing, the weather, cuddle puddles, fruit, deconstructing nationalist histories, the ocean, and changing their mind. they are forever reimagining their relationships to twelver islam, gender, success, capitalism, and both blood and chosen family. you can find her tweeting her feelings, daydreaming (read: imagining more just, compassionate worlds), growing and strengthening her love webs, discerning her role(s) in social justice movements, and curling up in patches of sun. hawa (ہوا) currently spends most of their time engaged in youth work at a middle school in the Bronx and working towards their masters degree in social work. hit her up for support redistributing wealth as a class privileged south asian/settler/gentrifier, to share life giving spiritualities, or to work together to facilitate the self-education and re-empowerment of youth of colour.
Cast member
(ہوا) hawa
Maya is a proud South Indian queer cis femme who reps Detroit and Bangalore but left her heart in Bombay. She has a lot of opinions, a lot of energy, and a LOT of emotions. Her work for the past 10 years as a community organizer has centered on developing leadership of people of color and directly impacted communities to agitate for reform and revolution across issues including housing, criminal justice, immigration, gender justice, anti-casteism, climate, and broadly racial and economic justice, following in - and queering up - the footsteps of her ancestors in the Quit India movement. She believes that liberation must include community, good food, good music, world travel, and lying in the sun, and she aspires to embody her alter-ego life as an anti-capitalist nomadic divemaster mermaid who sings, plays jazz violin, rides a bike around, reads a bunch of books on the beach, makes collective art, and decolonizes everything very soon.
Cast member
Maya
The part of her identity that Meghna is most proud of is that she is as blue-blooded Queens as it gets. However, she is, in some ways, an unusual New Yorker. Meghna has actually managed to live outside of the city as a young professional, when she spent three years working as a journalist in Bangalore, India. When she wasn't chasing stories on how technology was impacting the country, she was telling off cops in Kannada. The latter part seems to eventually have struck the woman as some cosmic sign of her one-true-home, because she has now returned to her abode in New York, still in shock that she gets to be a part of the amazing community at YKR. Meghna doesn't lay claim to much else and tries to let go of a little more each day. Except for the Queens bit.
Cast Member
Meghna
Hailing from sunny Los Angeles, Yumnah is a born and raised California girl turned die hard New Yorker (and proud!). The eldest daughter of Pakistani immigrants, her life has been an endless quest to figure out “who am I?” A social worker with a passion for storytelling, her lifework is centered around making the world a better place, regardless of how little or large an impact possible. She is the most Libra Libra to ever Libra, is a proud cat mama to two cats, and since marrying her partner, has become proud step-mama to two wondrous girls, for whom she is determined to make the world a little less harsh. Yumnah performed in the inaugural YKR 2015, co-directed YKR 2016, and is thrilled to be back to co-direct YKR 2018!
Co-Director
Yumnah
YKR 2018
YKR 2016
Ausso grew up in Iran and has been in the US since 2008, a little too long. She's finishing up her PhD in mechanical engineering soon but she got her 'real' education organizing in New York with anti war groups and engaging in sisterhood with amazing women and queer folks. She hopes to tell stories that are healing and immune to the gaze of power. Brooklyn is the closest thing to home she's got these days.
Cast Member
Ausso
Debayani Kar loves a captive audience, preferably out with friends, but a stage works, too. Debi is a writer, performer and storytelling strategist who makes her home in Brooklyn, NY. Her family is originally from Bangladesh and India and she grew up in Knoxville, TN. Yes, she was once a brown girl with a Southern accent.
She is co-director and cast member of Yoni Ki Raat 2016, and a cast member of Yoni Ki Raat 2017.
Co-Director
Debayani Kar
G is an aspiring historian, multi-media artist and educator. She grew up in Jakarta, California and Western India. The number of time she has moved homes comes surprisingly close to her age. Staring at books in rooms full of them puts her at ease. She is also an obsessive multitasker. She is making slow progress on the 3 languages she hopes to learn soon. She does not recommend this behaviour. She feels blessed to be in the company of the brilliant people listed here.
Cast Member
G
N is a nerd with the occasional funny streak. She identifies as Pakistani, Punjabi and American. She works as a scientist and is probably a bit too rational for her own good. N is a purveryor of pop culture and has been known to be somewhat of an insufferable know it all. She is an unasahmed catlady and will gladly distract herself with cat videos or gifs. She is super excited to be apart of this community of strong, independent South Asian women.
Cast Member
N
Nupur is an Oriya-American who grew up eating kulfi on the mean streets of Little India, Los Angeles. Despite her South Asian roots, she is is still learning how to make chai and is slowly beginning to appreciate Bollywood music videos. She spends most of her time pacifying teen angst through her work in education and can often be found being mistaken for a kid herself by NYC truancy police. Nupur is a classically trained Odissi dancer and would like to honor the intergenerational yoni stories of women in her community with this performance.
Cast Member
Nupur
Riti Sachdeva is a theatre maker, dancer, and cultural worker. She and her friends wonder “When did we get so old that we like Mary Oliver’s poetry?” A devoted student of flamenco, she has probably annoyed you practicing footwork while waiting on subway platforms or in line at TJ’s. She lives for the summer outdoor house music fetes. Riti cultivates her inner beach bum every chance she gets, follows astrology obsessively (Scorpio in the first house, sun in Leo, moon in Aries) drinks a lot of strong chai, enjoys observing colonies of ants, and scopes out fruit trees for ripe pickings. She is humbled to be in community and collaboration with these fellow yonis.
Cast Member
Riti Sachdeva
Shabana B is an Indo-Guyanese womxn who has lived in NYC her whole life. She does human rights work with different orgs, writes, and enjoys speaking in third person. Being Indo-Guyanese is perhaps what she holds closest to her heart about her identity and family. Because Indo-Caribbeans are often excluded from South Asian spaces, she wants to be the gateway, the hope, other Indo-Caribbean womxn find to assert themselves, reclaim their heritage, and ultimately reclaim their stories.
Cast Member
Shabana B
Y is a bookish Netflix addict and can usually be found curled up with a book or a film. Food is usually involved. A surefire way to make her smile is to ask her to show you a picture of her nephew. A veteran of both coasts, she has come to terms with being at home nowhere and everywhere, all at once. While her nickname embodies Rainer Maria Rilke's thoughts about living the questions now, so that we may "live along some distant day into the answer," she would just like to have the damn answers already, as living the questions sometimes means the answers come too late to do any good. She is trying to come to terms with this dichotomy.
Cast Member
Y
Born and raised in sunny Los Angeles, Yumnah is a Pakistani-American whose journey has brought her to NYC. When not basking in the stress and thrill of living out her dreams, Yumnah can be found curled up on the couch with her cats, watching Netflix and probably eating ice cream. She is the most Libra Libra to ever Libra, and loves getting lost in a good book with a strong cup of chai, and maybe some sour candy. With few years of performing under her belt, including the first-ever Yoni ki Raat in 2015, Yumnah is thrilled to be co-directing this year's YKR!
Co-Director
Yumnah
Benaifer is a storyteller, leadership coach and experience guide. Her life's work is to create safe spaces where people can share their personal experience and grow through the power of voice and non-judgmental listening. Through her work with major foundations, socially conscious companies, NGOs and educational institutions, she has fostered the storytelling of marginalized groups locally, in India, Eastern Europe, and Africa. She is the co-creator of “Two Women Talking”, a personal storytelling performance that explores gender, identity, violence and tradition. Benaifer grew up between the sea-face of Bombay and the cliff sides of England. She is also one of ~190,000 Zoroastrians in the world and is pretty proud of it.
She is co-director and cast member of Yoni Ki Raat 2017.
Co-Director
Benaifer
Born and bred in Jersey, Dee aspires to bring new levels of queerness to everyday life, with the help of both their lady love and feline life partner. Their passion lies in expanding models of gender, racial, and sexual identity and simultaneously promoting more complex narratives of those intersections. They are especially invested in complicating the literature on multiply-oppressed communities through detailed and comprehensive contextualization. Much of their time is spent advocating and agitating for racial and queer justice through literature, education and social media. In their free time, they write fiction, tell amazing dad jokes, fight dragons, and obey the whims of neighborhood cats.
Cast Member
Dee
Kirin is a fierce, queer, first-generation South Asian cis femme with a middle class background. Kirin has spent the past 7 years crossing issue lines to build power at the intersections in marginalized communities and a community organizer, trainer and strategist. She has political homes in many movements including student power, racial equity, queer and gender based liberation, reproductive rights and climate justice. She believes in building power through leadership development rooted in healing, strategic training and authentic mentorship. She is grounded in a tradition of organizing with under-resourced communities. She is devoted to getting her people get free. When she is not plotting the revolution, she can be found gushing about how great the Midwest is, reveling in the power of femmes, or refining her henna skills.
Cast Member
Kirin
Mallika is an illustrator by trade, and she's not very good at describing herself without having an out-of-body experience. Mallika hopes to use her words and her images to narrate the conflicts she faces in representing her identity through explorations of the binaries in her life, including expressions of gender, contrasts in environments, and the relationship between her cultural roots and her western upbringing. Hailing from a medium-sized town near Princeton, New Jersey, Mallika currently resides in Brooklyn, New York, where she spends most of her free time eating an unsettlingly large amount of fruit and reading mystery novels.
Cast Member
Mallika
Miranda is an Indo-Guyanese writer and storyteller based in New York. Born in Guyana, descending from the indentured laborers who left India and never went back, she is proud of her roots and heritage from both the Caribbean and the South Asian continent. Her DNA is filled with spice from the motherland, while the fire of the islands runs in her blood. An advocate for South Asian voices not yet heard and the stories not yet told, she is passionate about the arts and their ability to create change in the world and hopes to make her own contributions through her work. Her interests include traveling, reading biographies, spending evenings at the theater, reenacting choreography from Lady Gaga’s music videos, pursuing her circus career dreams as a flying trapeze artist, and making all kinds of magic happen.
Cast Member
Miranda
Sabrina is a Pakistani-American Muslim storyteller and community organizer raised in both rural Ohio and the Bay Area, now living in New York. Her day job is working for reproductive justice and abortion access for all people, so between Sabrina and Capitalism, she might have gotten the better deal. Outside of work, Sabrina makes visual art, mothers three kittens, and writes poetry, essays, and short fiction. She's passionate about oral histories and finds joy in the mountains and the backcountry, pie, hot summers, pie, and the revolution (and pie).
Cast Member
Sabrina
Shubha is an Indo-Canadian-New Yorker, and can be found complaining both when it's hot and when it's cold. She's an engineer, works in criminal justice reform, and is a creator of stories and art of all sorts. She is an alum of Yoni Ki Raat 2016. Her biggest, yet most elusive desire is to be seen - an ongoing quest that currently finds her in Brooklyn with a white man and a black cat. sbartist.org
She is co-director and cast member of Yoni Ki Raat 2017, and a cast member of Yoni Ki Raat 2016.
Co-Director
Shubha
YKR 2017
YKR 2015
Aaliya is a wanderlust-struck pyrotechnic with a penchant for the divine and the deviant. She grew up in Hong Kong, and has since lived in Edinburgh, Bombay, and now, Brooklyn. An attorney, poet and organizer, she has a full and fighting heart. She likes polka dots, avocados, and the sea.
She is co-director and cast member of Yoni Ki Raat 2015, and co-founder of Yoni Ki Raat NYC.
Co-Director
Aaliya
Nitika Raj is a transnational woman who comes alive dancing. Born in India and raised in Kuwait, she has lived in the U.S. for 16 years. Her yoni is a lotus of countless colorful petals. She lives in Brooklyn doing social justice work by day and arts activism by night. Nitika loves and heals and finds home in the ocean. Yoni ki Raat was her dance debut on a New York stage!
She is co-director and cast member of Yoni Ki Raat 2015, and co-founder of Yoni Ki Raat NYC.
Co-Director
Nitika Raj
Shahana Hanif is a Brooklyn born Bangladeshi. You’ll find her wrapped in a silk saree on a New York City stoop posing for a camera, usually an iPhone. She eats laddoos, sometimes dips them in sugarless hot chai to taste heaven. Shahana is often a jukebox at Desi weddings and can sing, in tune, your favorite Bollywood item song or ghazal.
Cast Member
Shahana Hanif
Swathi has spent her whole life wondering what’s for dinner (and for lunch, and for breakfast). She is more affectionate than a puppy and shrieks with joy at the sight of anything that is miniature. Swathi’s Midwestern roots explain her love for DIY projects and dairy products. She hopes to have a garden one day in New York, but for now is content with growing veggies on her fire escape.
Cast Member