Anurupa Roy (Class of 2008)
Anurupa Roy is a puppeteer, puppet theatre director and puppet designer. She is the founder and managing trustee of the Kat-Katha Puppet Arts Trust, a puppet theatre group based in Delhi, India since 1998.
Kat-Katha also focuses on collaborative processes and projects with other artists, communities, schoolteachers and children. These explorations have taken them to conflict zones like Kashmir, Manipur and Sri Lanka, to Juvenile Remand homes in Delhi, to Women’s self help group across villages in Uttarakhand, Bihar, Jharkhand, Tamil Nadu and Kashmir and to schools across India. They have performed shows across urban slums in India, trained community health workers, village school teachers, youth leaders to use puppets to talk about taboo issues like reproductive health and sexuality, the stigma around HIV/AIDS, gender discrimination and violence.
Anurupa Roy has a diploma in Puppet theatre from DI (Dramatiska Institutet) for Film, TV, Drama and Radio, at Stockholm University, Sweden and has been trained in traditional glove puppetry from the School of Traditional Glove Puppetry in Naples, Italy under Bruno Leone in 2002. She is a recipient of the Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar, 2007, a national award for contribution to puppet theatre by the Ministry of Culture. She is currently the Trustee of UNIMA India, now known as UNIMA Puppeteers Trust, the Indian Chapter of the Union Internationale de la Marionette.