Pria Dahiya is a director, visual artist and writer exploring internet culture through literary adaptation, movement and media design. With a passion for exploring the intersection of technology and humanity, Pria's work transcends the boundaries of traditional art forms, seamlessly blending 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 currently working on a media-led workshop production of “Dying Like Gods”, a new play written by her close collaborator, Rowan Dunlop. This play uses a hybrid media-theater piece, fusing traditional storytelling with heavy usage of projection, 3-D modeling, photogrammetry, AI-generated imagery and sound, and live feed manipulation to tell the story of two unsung characters from Homer’s the Odyssey. Additionally, she is directing Love and Money by Dennis Kelly as her BFA capstone project, which will be presented in April at Carnegie Mellon’s John Wells Studio Theatre.

She most recently 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 this 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. Additional projects she has self-produced in the past three years including Get Innocuous!, a dance-theater piece exploring data theft and loss of identity in the digital age, Iphis and Ianthe, a queer fantasia adapted from Ali Smith and Ovid 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 Directing the premiere of Adil Mansoor’s Amm(i)gone at KST’s Alloy Studios, and directed original dance and theater pieces for Carnegie Mellon’s Dance/Light and Playground Festivals. 

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 (Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Anons)”, was a finalist in Carnegie Mellon’s Student Film Competition.