Minita was most recently awarded a writing residency at The Ground Floor at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. They are a 2022 NYSAF Pfaelzer Award Finalist. She is also a librettist in Minnesota Opera Company’s New Works Cohort that launched in July 2022. Gandhi will be working on three commissioned pieces with the cohort, a MainStage opera, a song cycle, and a chamber piece, all to be completed over the course of seven years. Her play Daal and Duty and The Sun and all it’s Sighs have been part of the Ripped Festival at American Blues Theater in 2022 and 2020. She has been a dramaturg for PCPA Theaterfest’s production of Much Ado about Nothing and Book-It Theater’s World Premiere production of Behold the Dreamers. They are the director/producer for a 5-episode Documentary Series: History is Now . Other directing/writing credits include the digital production of Hindsight is 2020 or how Raisin Rainbows survived a pandemic starring Tony Award nominee Cora Vanderbroek, and new work development and readings at CAATA, and Stage Left Theater.

MUTHALAND | WRITTEN & PERFORMED BY MINITA GANDHI

The Life of a young woman is forever changed on a trip to India where she unearths family secrets, encounters a prophet, and ultimately discovers her voice within a culture of silence. The familiar and the foreign swap roles in this dark comedy about culture, identity, spirituality, and sexuality.

Minita Gandhi represents a new voice in American theater who takes us on an epic journey of a coming of age first-generation Indian-American female. The “dark comedy” inspired by true stories takes us on magical but tragic trip to India. It closed a sold-out run of it’s World Premiere (click link for press) at 16thStreet Theater after being extended twice before it closed at the end of October 2017. It had a west coast premiere at PCPA Theaterfest in October of 2018 and was most recently seen at Florida Studio Theater May 2019 as 1 of the 4 plays selected for the NNPN Women in Playwriting Festival where it was sold-out and received a standing ovation.

Minita was honored to perform Muthaland as a selected participant of the CAATA CONFEST hosted by Oregon Shakespeare Festival in October 2016. And she had the privilege to perform at the Statera Foundation for Women in the Arts Conference hosted by the Denver Center for the Performing Arts as well. The play was originally developed and given four sold out workshop performances at Silk Road Rising Theater for their Solo Festival in downtown Chicago where it received a standing ovation each time. It was then invited to be a part of the prestigious Ignition Festival of new plays at the Tony Award winning Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago alongside esteemed playwrights such as Jose Rivera and Julia Cho, where it was sold out and received yet another standing ovation. The Indo-American Heritage Museum invited Minita to perform two special performances at the Raven Theater in Chicago and in Naperville where the play had the audience leaping to their feet once more. The play has been skillfully directed by Heidi Stillman, the Artistic Director of Lookingglass Theater for its initial runs. Muthaland has been featured by NPR, NBC News, Carry On Harry on ITV Gold, TVAsia, Splash Magazine, and the Times of India. Three graduate students from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University shot a documentary about her life and the making of Muthaland. The film is entitled MY MUTHALAND won a regional EMMY award for best documentary! Watch here.

In 2014, while foraging through her parents’ basement, she discovered her father’s worn suitcase from his very first journey to the United States, with a single statement scribbled in black Sharpie on the back of the bag: “When I die, discard this bag if you like, until then it stays.” This sparked a curiosity about her parents’ life journey and led to vulnerable interviews where they shared stories from their history they had never spoken of before. The telling of these stories began to bridge the cultural and generational distance between her and her family. Gandhi then realized by weaving their stories with her own life-changing journey to India in 2009 for her brother's arranged marriage, she had a powerful story she had to share with the world. Muthaland shares the magic of her journey to India, full of prophets, ritual, and the convergence of American and Indian cultures.

After the first table read in 2015 a documentary entitled “India’s Daughter,” from BBC about the fatal gang rape of a young woman in New Delhi was banned because the Indian government felt it would “defame” India. Minita realized she could no longer treat the topic of sexual violence as a “bad dream.” She felt empowered to share her own experience with the world.