Ketu Katrak
Ketu H. Katrak, born in Bombay, India, is Professor Emerita in the Department of Drama at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). Katrak is the author of Astad Deboo: An Icon of Contemporary Indian Dance (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2025, and University of Chicago Press); Jay Pather, Performance and Spatial Politics in South Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021); Contemporary Indian Dance: New Creative Choreography in India and the Diaspora (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, paperback, 2014), Politics of the Female Body: Postcolonial Women Writers (Rutgers UP, 2006), and Wole Soyinka and Modern Tragedy: A Study of Dramatic Theory and Practice (Greenwood Press, 1986).
Katrak has co-edited with Astad Deboo, MARG: A Magazine of the Arts (since 1946, Mumbai, India) 68:4, June 2017. Special Issue on “Contemporary Dance in India”; co-edited with Dr. Anita Ratnam Voyages of Body and Soul: Selected Female Icons of India and Beyond. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014.
Katrak’s published essays in Drama, Dance, Postcolonial Theory, African and Postcolonial Women Writers appear in journals such as The Drama Review, African Theatre, Theater Research International, Pulse: Asian Music and Dance, Amerasia, Modern Fiction Studies, South Asian Popular Culture, and in the Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater, Ed. Nadine George-Graves, and the Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment, Ed. Mark Franko..
Katrak has served as dramaturg (2007-2008) for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s (OSF) production of The Clay Cart (an ancient Sanskrit play in English translation). She has given numerous Noon Lectures for OSF’s Education Department on new plays such as Naomi Wallace’s The Liquid Plain, Julia Cho’s The Language Archive, and Lynn Nottage’s Sweat. Katrak has also served as dramaturg for the US premier of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s and Micere G. Mugo’s play, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, produced at UC, Irvine in 2014.
Katrak is the recipient of a Fulbright Research Award to India (2005-06); University of California, Humanities Research Institute’s Fellowship (2002); The Bunting Institute Fellowship (1988-89) (Harvard/Radcliffe); and the Chancellor's Award for Multiculturalism (1993) from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.