Bio:

Pria Dahiya is a director, visual artist and writer exploring internet culture through literary adaptation, movement and media design. Pria has also spent twenty-one years being biracial, bisexual, and chronically online. Her work touches on the absurd code-switching and constant alienation of this duality, and how the internet can hide, broadcast, and manipulate these conflicting identities.

She is co-artistic director (with Spencer Byham-Carson) of a new Pittsburgh-Based theater company, New Product Company. Their theater company seeks to physicalize the digital, committed to creating a new vision for theater that reflects, distorts, and communalizes the isolation of the modern world. Their inaugural production, Stein/Plath,  is supported by the History Matters Sallie Bingham grant and is set to debut in August. Additionally, she is directing Love and Money by Dennis Kelly as her BFA capstone project, which will be presented in April at Carnegie Mellon.

She most recently directed a media-led workshop production of the new play Dying Like Gods (playwright: Rowan Dunlop), supported by the Studio for Creative Inquiry’s Frank-Ratchye Further Fund. This hybrid media-theater piece fused traditional storytelling with heavy usage of AI-generated imagery and shadow puppetry to tell the story of two unsung characters from Homer’s the Odyssey. 

In fall 2023 she completed a two-month residency through Kelly Strayhorn Theatre’s Freshworks artist-in-residency program. Her cumulative project, You and Me and the End of the World was a devised theater piece exploring the relationship between alienation, desire, mortality, and the internet. Through close collaboration with performers, dramaturgy and media design, the team crafted an original story of first love, first loss, and a thoroughly annoying pandemic. 

Her prior work, Anything Good Makes Me Want to Die, was an evening of two short, surreal plays adapted from Otessa Moshfegh’s short stories, self-produced at a donated warehouse in Pittsburgh. She has also produced several other hybrid theater/film/performance works, including: D0uble (experimental short film adapted from Dostoyevsky), The Computer Room (Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Anons) (finalist in Carnegie Mellon’s Student Film Competition), Iphis and Ianthe (a queer retelling of Ovid by way of Ali Smith) and Poem of the End (adapted from Russian Poet Marina Tsvetaeva).

In addition to her work in self-producing and adaptation, she served as Assistant Director for the premiere of Adil Mansoor’s Amm(i)gone at KST’s Alloy Studios, and directed original pieces for Carnegie Mellon’s Dance/Light and Playground Festivals (Get Innocuous and Last Week’s Late Nights Live!). 

In addition to theater, she has served as the editor-in-chief of CMU’s Arts and Culture magazine, and has worked as a Teaching Assistant for Directing Courses at CMU. Her first short film “The Computer Room…”, was a finalist in Carnegie Mellon’s Student Film Competition. In addition to her work as a director, Pria has successfully pursued an additional major in Social and Political History at Carnegie Mellon’s Dietrich College, completing a 67-page paper of original historical research based around materials in Carnegie Mellon University’s libraries. She is currently adapting this research into her first nonfiction documentary work, Celluloid Curtains.