NAYIKA
A DANCING GIRL

Nithya Nagarajan

Nithya Nagarajan is an artist-curator with an expansive practice that is interested in the micro and macro qualities of movement. Having extensive training in Bharatanatyam, Nithya has been a soloist and a principal dancer of the Abinaya Natyalaya dance company in Chennai, India. Select creative credits include The Jungle and The Sea (Assistant Director – Belvoir St Theatre 2022), Sacred Grooves for Secular Spaces (Director, MPavilion 2020) and Outwitted! (Co-Director, Happenstance 2017). She was most recently co-Artistic Director at Arts House and forms 1/4th of a South Asian arts collective H-ME W-RK. She holds an award-winning PhD in performance studies for her field research on the intersection of gender and genre in Indian dance. 

Liv Satchell

NAYIKA: A Dancing Girl is Liv’s Belvoir debut.

For La Mama Theatre, her body of work The Grief Trilogy has included I sat and waited but you were gone too long, my sister feather, and let bleeding girls lie. For Melbourne Fringe Festival and fortyfivedownstairs, she directed SIRENS by Benjamin Nichol.

Her plays have been variously shortlisted for the Phillip Parsons Fellowship for Emerging Playwrights, the Rodney Seaborn Playwrights Award, the Max Afford Playwrights Award, and the Queensland Premier’s Drama Award. She has been nominated for Best Director four times at the Green Room Awards and both I sat and waited and let bleeding girls lie won Best New Writing for Independent Theatre. SIRENS won the Emerging Company Incubator Award and the SA Touring Award at Melbourne Fringe Festival.

Vaishnavi Suryaprakash

Vaishnavi Suryaprakash is an actor, dancer and emerging writer. She completed her training at the National Institute of Dramatic Art, Sydney, in 2017 and also holds an Arts/Law degree from Sydney University. Her theatre credits include Counting and Cracking, Life of Galileo and Sami in Paradise for Belvoir; Grand Horizons, White Pearl and Julius Caesar (as understudy) for the Sydney Theatre Company; What the Ocean Said at the Sydney Opera House; Moby Dick for Sport for Jove; and Pramkicker for Vox Theatre. Her television credits include Wakefield for ABC, Pieces of Her for Netflix and The Secrets She Keeps for Lingo Pictures. She also appeared in the short films Pass the Parcel and Stories of Kannagi, which won the Blake Prize. Vaishnavi won the Helpmann Award for Best Female Actor in a Supporting Role in a Play for her performance in Counting and Cracking. She is currently a literary associate at Belvoir, and was selected for this year’s AFTRS (Australian Film Television and Radio School) Writing Talent Camp.

Marco Cher-Gibard

Marco Cher-Gibard (b. Auckland, 1983), is an artist working with sound exploring contemporary culture, expression and experience. They are a tireless collaborator and contributor to performance work. 

Select performance projects include Super Discount & Lady Eats Apple with Back to Back Theatre. K-BOX, Monsters & I am a Miracle for Malthouse Theatre. Laurinda  for Melbourne Theatre Company, Narasima& Mohini with Raina Peterson, Siren Dance & Memoir for the River and the Dictator with Lilian Steiner, We All Know What’s Happening with Samara Hersch and Lara Thoms. New Breed for Sydney Dance Company.

Recent awards include the Golden Lion Award for Lifetime Achievement in Theatre and the International Ibsen Award with Back to Back Theatre, Greenroom awards for sound design, site innovation and multiple Melbourne Fringe awards.

Bhairavi Raman

Bhairavi Raman is a skilled Indian-Australian violinist. Extensively trained in Western Classical and Carnatic music, she weaves concepts and techniques from both forms, using the violin to express her bicultural identity. She holds an A.Mus.A in violin awarded by the AMEB, and has pursued advanced training in Carnatic Music in India for the past 15 years.  Her gurus are Sri Murali Kumar (Aus.),  Sri Gopinath Iyer (Aus.) and Sri S Varadarajan (India).

Bhairavi brings 15 years of performance experience, with over 400 performances to her name, including the Madras Music Academy (2017, 2018) and the Melbourne Recital Centre (2023, 2024).  Her music represents a formidable blend of traditional knowledge homed in India, technical mastery, musical boldness and an authentically Melburnian voice.

Collaboration is at the heart of Bhairavi’s creative work – she has produced acclaimed projects in close partnership with local and international artists across disciplines including poetry, spoken word, movement, dance and theatre. She has also completed arts leadership programs with the Australian Art Orchestra (2020) and Footscray Community Arts Centre (2021).

Outside of performing, Bhairavi works with a team of volunteers to run Gamaka, a grassroots not-for-profit arts organisation.  She also balances a career outside of the arts as a Director at a consulting firm.

Marco Cher-Gibard

Marco Cher-Gibard (b. Auckland, 1983), is an artist working with sound exploring contemporary culture, expression and experience. They are a tireless collaborator and contributor to performance work. 

Select performance projects include Super Discount & Lady Eats Apple with Back to Back Theatre. K-BOX, Monsters & I am a Miracle for Malthouse Theatre. Laurinda  for Melbourne Theatre Company, Narasima& Mohini with Raina Peterson, Siren Dance & Memoir for the River and the Dictator with Lilian Steiner, We All Know What’s Happening with Samara Hersch and Lara Thoms. New Breed for Sydney Dance Company.

Recent awards include the Golden Lion Award for Lifetime Achievement in Theatre and the International Ibsen Award with Back to Back Theatre, Greenroom awards for sound design, site innovation and multiple Melbourne Fringe awards.

Keerthi Subramanyam

Keerthi is a Sydney based set and costume designer for live performance and film. Keerthi is a National Institute of Dramatic Art, BFA (Design for Performance, 2019) graduate, and a member of the Australian Production Design Guild.

Keerthi has designed set and costumes for Darlinghurst Theatre Company’s Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner, Chewing Gum Dreams at the Old Fitz, Chop Chef at Riverside Theatres, and designed the costumes and was a set realiser on Belvoir’s At What Cost.

Keerthi has been an associate designer on a wide range of theatre shows including Sydney Theatre Company’s Grand Horizons, Belvoir’s Jungle and the Sea, Wayside Bride, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, Boomkak Panto, Cursed!, and Hayes Theatre Co’s Young Frankenstein. 

Keerthi has also worked as a props supervisor on Belvoir’s Into the Woods and Blessed Union. 

Keerthi’s film credits include working as a design assistant on Operation Buffalo, as production & costume designer on various short films and music videos and most recently as an art director on SBS’s mini series Appetite.  Keerthi is one of Belvoir’s Artistic Associates. She is currently working across theatre and art installation. 

Morgan Moroney

Morgan Moroney (he/him) is a lighting and video designer working across theatre, opera, dance and installation.

Morgan’s work as Lighting Designer includes SHITTY (Belvoir 25A) Inferno (Australian Brandenburg Orchestra), Saplings and Shack (ATYP), Girls in Boys Cars (NTofP) Suddenly Last Summer and Clyde’s (Ensemble), The Barber of Seville (Opera Australia National Tour). His video design work includes A Letter for Molly and Still Unqualified (Ensemble). Lighting and Video Designer include: Collapsible, which he won the 2023 Sydney Theatre Awards Best Lighting Design of an Independent Production, Camp (Siren Theatre & WorldPride) and A Practical Guide to Self-Defence (Merrigong & NTofP).

Morgan received the 2020 APDG Emerging Designer for Live Performance Award for his design on Ghosts (NIDA). He has been nominated three times for a Sydney Theatre Award in Best Independent Lighting Design, and won the 2023 APDG Award in Lighting Design for Cleansed (Redline Productions).

Morgan worked with Nick Schlieper as Assistant Lighting Designer for The Phantom of the Opera on Sydney Harbour (Opera Australia). His upcoming productions for 2024 include The Queen’s Nanny (Ensemble) and The Turn of The Screw (Hayes Theatre).

S. Shakthidharan

Shakthi is a western Sydney storyteller with Sri Lankan heritage and Tamil ancestry. He’s a writer, director and producer of theatre and film, and composer of original music.

Belvoir: The Jungle and the Sea (Co-written with Eamon Flack) and Counting and Cracking (Associate Writer Eamon Flack). His other theatre credits include Zana Fraillon’s The Bone Sparrow (Pilot Theatre, York UK), 宿Stay (Sydney Festival); and has in development a new play with Belvoir, as well as a co-commission with the MTC and STC, his first novel, a feature film with Felix Media and a new TV project.

His debut play Counting and Cracking received critical, commercial and community acclaim. The script won the Victorian Premier’s Literature Prize and the NSW Premier’s Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting; the production won 7 Helpmann and 3 Sydney Theatre Awards. Shakthi’s most recent play The Jungle and the Sea, again was met with rave reviews and had a profound impact on the Sri Lankan community. It recently won the 2024 Victorian Premier’s Drama Prize and 4 Sydney Theatre Awards including Best Mainstage Production.

Shakthi is the Director of Kurinji and previous to this was Founder/Artistic Lead of Co-Curious (2018-2022), sister company to CuriousWorks where he was Founder and Artistic Director (2003-2018). Shakthi was the Carriageworks inaugural Associate Artist and is a recipient of both the Phillip Parson’s and Kirk Robson awards.

Based in: Sydney Australia

Carissa Licciardello

Carissa Licciardello is a Resident Director at Belvoir. She was previously an Artistic Associate for the company and its inaugural Andrew Cameron Fellow. She graduated from NIDA’s Directing course in 2017.

Her credits include: for Belvoir – as Director/Co-Adaptor, A Room of One’s Own; as Associate Director, Fangirls 2019; as Assistant Director, Counting & Cracking; Ghosts. For Sydney Theatre Company, as Assistant Director, Rules for Living. For 25A Downstairs Belvoir: Extinction of the Learned Response; The Maids.

Carissa is also a recipient of the 2020 Glorias Fellowship.

Maria Tran

Maria Tran is a Vietnamese-Australian actor, filmmaker, and martial artist who has won multiple awards for her work in film, TV, stage, and performance. She also specializes in fight action choreography and is the founder of Phoenix Eye Films, a female-led production company based in both Australia and the US.

In 2022, Maria moved to the United States and landed her breakthrough role as Madame Tien on the 10-episode crime drama Paramount series “Last King of the Cross” starring Tim Roth. Maria has also been involved in stage productions, including as a fight director and performer for Bell Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” and her own theater production “Action Star,” which premiered at the OzAsia Festival in Adelaide in 2022. Her feature action thriller “Echo 8,” Australia’s first female-led action movie, has won several awards, including Tokyo Film Awards for Best Film and Winner for Best Feature Film – Women’s Film at the World Carnival-Singapore Film Festival and currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

Zainab Syed

Zainab Syed is the Director of International at Creative Australia, leading the organizations’
international engagement strategy for the arts.

Originally from Pakistan, Zainab has lived, studied and worked across Romania, Yemen,
England, Wales, US and Australia. Her practice sits at the intersection of social justice and live
performance. After graduating from Brown University, USA, she toured across the world as a
performance poet working with incarcerated women, trauma victims and refugees in prisons and
detention centres.

From 2014-2017 Zainab worked as a researcher with the Centre for Muslim States and Societies
in Perth, WA and New York University, USA. Between 2017-2023 Zainab worked at Performing
Lines WA in Perth and Belvoir St Theatre in Sydney as a Senior Producer spearheading
ambitious works of scale with artists across dance and theatre. Her work has focused on
facilitating intercultural collaborations, developing inclusive frameworks for creating new work
and pathways for culturally diverse artists; as well touring Australian works regionally, nationally
and internationally alongside advocacy work enabling systemic change within small to medium
and mainstage institutions in Australia.

Zainab has served on the board of the Blue Room Theatre board and Theatre Network Australia
board. She is also a founder of Pakistan Poetry Slam, co-founder of HME-WRK: a diverse arts
collective, a Humanitarian Observer with the Australian Red Cross Immigration Detention
Program and a 2020 Churchill Fellow.

Christopher Gurusamy

Christopher Gurusamy is a full-time professional Bharatanatyam artiste, based in Sydney, Australia and Chennai, India.  He is regarded as one of the frontrunners of his generation having performed extensively within India and globally.

Born and raised in Perth, Western Australia, Christopher moved to India at the age of 18, and is the first Australian to study at the renowned dance and arts institution Kalakshetra.  Christopher attended the college from 2005 to 2011 during the tenure of Leela Samson as Director, receiving a first-class post-graduate diploma in 2011. As a highly popular soloist, Christopher performs annually in Chennai’s prestigious December Season including for the Madras Music Academy, Sri Krishna Gana Sabha, and Narada Gana Sabha, and has been invited to speak and present his work at major conferences around the world. He has received widespread critical acclaim including the Narasimhachari Dance Award (Narada Gana Sabha, 2022), being named Best Dance of 2017 (New York Times), HCL Best Performer (Madras Music Academy, 2015) and was conferred the Kalavahini Fellowship for Choreography by leading dancer Malavika Sarukkai in 2018.

Tanya Leach

Tanya has been a freelance stage manager for 40 years.

Her theatre credits include Life of Galileo (Belvoir); Our Country’s Good / The Recruiting Officer, Little Murders (MTC); The Dance of Death (Sydney Festival 2024); Three Furies, The Baulkham Hills African Ladies Troupe, Sunshine Super Girl (Performing Lines); Saint Joan, The White Devil, Salt, The Cherry Orchard, Mother Courage Riflemind, True West, The Removalist, Sex with Strangers, Loot, Arms and the Man Noises Off, Talk, Still Point Turning, A Fool in Love (part season) (STC); The Gospel According to Paul, Maureen: Harbinger of Death (Soft Tread Productions); IDK (Force Majeure).

Opera and musical work credits include The Marriage of Figaro (VSO); The Turn of the Screw, The Pearlfishers, Lulu, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg (Opera Australia); Platée, Guistino (Pinchgut Opera); Memorial (Brink Productions); Watershed (Adelaide Festival 2022).

Tanya is a proud member of The Alliance.