“I feel we are just beginning to understand what decades of colonization have done to culture and human animals and how we see the world. My sense is that the first step to decolonizing - especially for women of color - is interpreting stories in a body sense way, letting our mysterious reactions guide us, getting out of the head, out of the overemphasis on English even as we speak it and write in it.”
- Shebana Coelho
EXPERIENCE HIGHLIGHTS
EXPERIENCE HIGHLIGHTS
OVERVIEW
award- winning, multidisciplinary artist whose work spans writing, filmmaking, theater, dance, and facilitating creativity workshops. Currently studying flamenco in Spain.
AWARDS
Fiction Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, a Fulbright research grant to Mongolia and a CEC ArtsLink award to Palestine. List below
RECENTLY
Recently received a grant from the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union to go to Kerry, Ireland to develop performances responding to the landscape myth of Amergin, Sceine and my grandmother who loved the sea.
Since 2012, has facilitated Faraway is Close creativity workshops in New Mexico, Zuni pueblo, Palestine, Mongolia, American Samoa, and Spain.
Stories, poems and articles have been published widely in US and international journals such as Slice, Calyx, The Normal School, the On Being Blog, Al Jazeera America, Time Out Mumbai, The Best Women’s Travel Writing anthology (translated into Swedish for the anthology, Gränslös, “without borders”.)
Plays staged in New York at the Pan Asian Repertory Theater’s NuWorks festival, Spain (Cadiz and Sevilla), New Mexico, Hawaii, Los Angeles and American Samoa and include the solo plays, The Good Manners of Colonized Subjects and Once I was a stone, una piedra, ek pathar, When the Stars Trembled in Rio Puerco (National Hispanic Cultural Center), and Undo (The Players Club, NYC). Collaborated with ASHTAR Theater in Ramallah, Palestine on the multimedia project Land Out Loud. Currently developing a cello and movement piece, “My grandmother is the silence of Sceíne and the song of Amergin.”
DOCUMENTARIES
Documentaries broadcast on outlets such as BBC Radio Four, the Discovery Channel and American PBS, have been recognized by a TELLY award and a South Asian Journalist Association best documentary award and have been screened in New Mexico and Spain.
journey | study
ON THE MOVE, I’M AT HOME
My journeys began when I left NYC in 2006 - I felt done with city life - and went to Tiera del Fuego in Argentina. from there to Bolivia, Peru, Mexico.
And the big adventure of Mongolia where I spent a year and a half on a Fulbright research grant to record the sounds and stories of nomadic communities! Mongolia changed my life. I wrote about it in this essay that was later selected to Best Women’s Travel Writing. Read more at storiesfromthesteppe.com
Faraway is Close is another name for all my work: resonant cross cultural experiences that dissolve borders that keep us from our connection to story, land and each other.
Decades worth of self-directed study and reading on healing trauma, engaging with fear, developing tools to calm the body, and spirit and believe in new possibilities - healers whose inspirations I am grateful for are: Thich Nhat Hanh, Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird, Help Thanks Wow), Tara Brach, Parker Palmer, Martha Beck, Lisa Culhane, Cara Jones, Rosamund and Benjamin Zander (The Art of Possibility), Gay Hendricks (the big leap) Amanda Frances, Jack Kornfield.
ONE OF MY MOST PIVOTAL EXPERIENCES
Navarasa Sadhana workshop by G. Venu at Natanakairali Arts (Kerala) that draws on ancient Vedic texts and kudiyattam, classical Sanskrit theater to liberate, in the artist, the source of performance energy.
LYNN & MATHEW MATHER
We were delighted to have Shebana as a guest facilitator on our MA Art, Psyche and Creative Imagination programme at Limerick School of Art and Design. She took our students for the day for creative poetry, embodied movement and more. Shebana has an immediate enchanted presence and the rare talent of organically bringing anyone and groups of people with her into rich layers of sacred play and effortless flow into the various forms of imaginative expressions that she is so experienced and infectiously able to convey.
Also…
the shab in my name means night and I really love the mystery of what I call the intuitive dark.
The first thing I tend to notice in the night sky when I look up - almost always - is Orion’s Belt.
If two pairs of socks that don’t match find their way into my hands, I put them on without hesitation!
I can easily read and re-read the writing of Ursula LeGuin (the language of the night, Earthsea series).
I love that moment in The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald when the stranger talks about the thing that you cannot forget, that is meant only for you.
The first Satyajit Ray film I saw was when I was around twenty at the theaters at Lincoln Center. I remember crying almost all the way through to think, 'oh someone who came from where I come from made such beauty.
Oh and the absolute taut power and other vision of Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys just slays me.
Awards
Creative Europe Mobility Grant (2023)
Fulbright Research Grant to Mongolia (2007)
Fiction Fellowship, New York Foundation for the Arts (2004)
CEC ArtsLink Project award to collaborate with Ashtar Theatre, Ramallah for the project Land Out Loud (2014)
James T. Yee Mentorship Award, Center for Asian American Media (CAAM) (2002)
and:
2012 & 2013 Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation grants
2004 Jerome Foundation Emerging Artist Fellowship through the New York Mills Center for the Arts residency
2004 Fiction Grant, Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation
2003 Archie D. & Bertha Walker Scholarship for fiction, Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA
2001 Telly Award for PBS/WNET documentary, Desi, South Asians in New York
2001 South Asian Journalists Association Award-First Prize, best documentary feature, Desi