Kuljeet Singh
Biography
Known for his restrained performance in films like Margarita With A Straw and Amu, Kuljeet is the founder and Creative Director of Atelier Theatre, a Delhi-based theatre group. Besides his teaching profession in the Department of English, University of Delhi, he has been practicing theatre since his college days and his interest lies in Performance and film Studies.
His M. Phil dissertation thesis is on the history of theatre on the campus of the University of Delhi since 1924 from the works of St. Stephen's The Shakespeare Society. He is presently working on his doctoral thesis, which is a continuation of the same area.
His vast experience of performing includes several theatre productions under the direction of M.K. Raina, Avtar Sahni, Surendra Sharma, Roysten Abel, Anna-Helena McLean, and VK Sharma, as well as acting in Sonali Bose's National Award-winning film Amu, Imtiaz Ali's Rockstar and Sharad Nigam's Interval.
Recipient of Junior fellowship in Theatre (Ministry of Culture, GOI), Yuva Puruskar (Sahitya Kala Parishad, Government of Delhi) and YCE - Young Creative Entrepreneur Award (British Council, India), Kuljeet has adapted and directed more than a dozen full-length productions for Atelier Theatre: Self-scripted Goodbye Blue Sky, Barrie Keeffe' SUS, Jean Anouilh's Antigone, Manu Bhandari's Mahabhoj, Neil Simon's Laughter On The 23rd Floor and Rumors (as ''Khusar Phusar''), Edward Albee's The Zoo Story, Badal Sircar's Baaki Itihas and Saari Raat and of late Ramu Ramanathan's Collaborators.
His magnum opus Goodbye Blue Sky was awarded by Sahitya Kala Parishad in 2006 and has been performed in Delhi, Mumbai, and Kolkata. He has also directed half a dozen productions for college students and more than 20 one-act plays for different schools in Delhi, Rajasthan, Punjab, and Himachal Pradesh.
He is a faculty in Theatre and Dramatic Arts with schools of repute and is instrumental in developing and implementing methodologies of teaching and effective incorporation of specific elements of drama in the classroom.
He has conceptualized and designed seven Campus Theatre festivals in the past successfully. These theatre festivals are meticulously designed to foster theatre activities in the Campus of the University of Delhi. Since 2007, with 8 episodes, this festival has invited 330 performances from different college groups, each photographed and documented.
Moreover, Kuljeet is the sole resource who has collected, collated, cataloged, and organized Campus Theatre Tradition in the last decade. in 2013-14, in its 7th episode, the festival showcased the documentation through exhibitions at the India Habitat Centre.
Besides, his brainchild Performing Series is an annual feature of Atelier Theatre, which looks at the works of Indian authors/playwrights in their entirety. After Performing a Series on Tagore in 2011, and Badal Sircar in 2012 (performed Baaki Itihas AND Saari Raat in August 2012), Atelier Repertory completed a series on the works of Ramu Ramanathan in 2013 and is gearing up for a series on Girish Karnad in 2015.
Of late he directed Project Antigone and Kujh Afsaney in Punjabi language and plans to create a corpus of substantial work in Punjabi language. At present, he is working on two books: editing Shudrak's Mrichhakatikam and compiling a collection of poems entitled Then and When along with acting in Seekh Kabab, a play.
