About

TLDR: Public theater artist, community organizer, and urban planner dedicated to telling funny stories about our changing climate, covered in Hyperallergic (!!!), here, and here. Currently bringing my original performance, A Fun Play about How Scary Climate Change Is, to the Queens Botanical Garden: RSVP here! It’s a public part piece about leaning into hope, not despair, in the face of climate change, and launched this September at Rockaway Beach, Edgemere Farm, Gowanus Dredgers Boathouse, La Plaza Cultural, and Hunters Point Park as part of the Amanda+James Coastlines Festival, Brooklyn Arts Council, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

I am a public theater artist, director, performer, composer and writer obsessed with creating performances in unusual public spaces, from vacant lots, to open streets, to the beach, to early childcare centers, to community gardens, to public parks, to piers, to online. I am the co-founder and artistic director of Fresh Lime Soda Productions, a contemporary South Asian political theater ensemble and incubator.

I’m currently performing in Dance Nation (Brooklyn College, d. Katy Early) and Warm Science (Brick Theater, d. Laia Comas). I’m a fellow with Culture Push, writing and directing a play about flooding and member of TAG @ the Tank. Previously, I was an Artist in Residency at NYU where I directed and co-wrote Rainy Day Play, a devised play about climate change and flooding in three waterfront parks. I recently directed and wrote a collaborative performance for Make the Road with workers from DRUM, Local 79, and the Street Vendor Project for their May Day Rally. I was a public space programming partner with the Department of Transportation, performing and directing a bilingual children’s play about composting throughout their open streets in Brooklyn and Queens.

I’m a climate planner and recently graduated from Columbia with a Masters in Urban Planning, where I wrote my thesis about vacant lots in Rockaway, hosting a series of creative community visioning sessions throughout community spaces in the peninsula, and was the recipient of the Charles Abrams Thesis Award. I’ve worked writing city council policy in Brooklyn, creating public spaces and open streets in Queens, and on a community land trust in the Bronx. I like to write about myself (can you tell?) and am a New City Critics Fellow at the Urban Design Forum, writing about (you guessed it) climate change and flooding. Check out some past pieces about climate organizing, food justice, archiving, the Zoom chat, hybridity, and mapmaking.

Feel free to peruse this (overly detailed but always under construction) website for more (self-indulgent) parentheticals or send a signal: unnisabina@gmail.com.