Artist’s Statement
PRIA DAHIYA is a multidisciplinary artist and arts leader whose practice centers on multimedia storytelling at the intersection of performance, projection design, video art, and critical writing. Drawing from interdisciplinary training and tech-forward methodologies, Dahiya creates work that interrogates the liminal space between IRL and URL, investigating how the performed self diverges from—or perhaps constructs—the authentic self.
Informed by experiences navigating bisexual and biracial identities, Dahiya's work examines how individuals strategically perform or obfuscate identity within surveilled digital landscapes. As a digital native raised with ubiquitous internet access, Dahiya probes urgent questions: What does it mean to construct selfhood in the age of constant documentation? Why does art matter when capitalism has subsumed it entirely into commerce and spectacle?
Directorial Philosophy
I don't believe the best idea wins—I believe the room wins. Theater only works when everyone has a voice, when collaboration isn't a courtesy but the essential condition of creation. The hierarchy I'm interested in is temporal, not interpersonal: the supremacy of this moment, right now, over all others.
My work stands on the shoulders of movement-based multimedia avant-garde companies—SITI Company, The Wooster Group, Frantic Assembly, Complicite, Tectonic Theater Project—artists who understood that the body thinks, that media isn't decoration but dramaturg, that form and content are inseparable. But I'm pushing further: pioneering a new theater that merges the digital and the physical not as separate realms but as a single, integrated landscape where presence happens.
If Tarkovsky sculpted in time, I sculpt in the present. The past and future matter only insofar as they illuminate where we stand—here, in this room, in this rehearsal, in this breath between impulse and action. I make theater with the radical proposition that right now is the most important moment there has ever been. Not tomorrow's opening. Not yesterday's vision. Now.
This means not waiting. Not asking permission. It means returning to an older aesthetics and ethics of art-making, one that begins with a simple, urgent declaration: We have something to say, and if we don’t say it, no one will.
Artistic Biography (Or, A Life in The Theatre)
Pria Dahiya was born in 2001 in Washington, D.C.
She began performing onstage at the age of four. Her first professional production was at aged six with the Washington Revels. She continued theater training over three years in Imagination Stage’s Conservatory Programs. In high school, she was a member of the pre-professional Musical Theater company Act II at Levine, and founded the tuition-free educational youth theater company The Free Theater with other alumni from Act II.
By 17, Pria was writing theater criticism through the Shakespeare Theater Company’s Teen Critics Program and interning in the education department of Roundhouse Theater. As a High School student, she directed Jeffrey Hatcher’s Miss Nelson Is Missing!, Twelfth Night for the Folger Shakespeare Secondary School Festival, and In The Heights for the Free Theater.
As an undergraduate in the B.F.A. Directing program at Carnegie Mellon School of Drama, Pria directed over ten theatrical productions. She directed the scripted works Love and Money by Dennis Kelly and The Bald Soprano by Eugene Ionesco, but quickly found her artistic calling to be in new play development and devised work. She worked as assistant director on the premiere of Adil Mansoor’s Amm(i)gone at Kelly Strayhorn Theater and it’s subsequent performance at Boston’s The Theater Offensive.
She was selected as a Freshworks Artist-in-Residence for the Kelly Strayhorn Theater’s 2023 season, where she presented her devised performance You and Me and the End of the World. She has continued to work with KST, directing their Fall 2024 fundraising concert Suite Life, which she will also be directing in November 2025.
Upon graduation, Pria founded New Product Company, with her long-term collaborator and fellow CMU graduate Spencer Byham-Carson. New Product Company is an experimental, multimedia theater company. Their inaugural season included the original play Earth Angel, Mark Ravenhill’s classic in-yer-face text Pool, No Water, and a production of lily gonzales’ new play PLAY:BODY. In January 2025, Pria directed the premiere of Anna King Skeel’s new play My Sister’s Lipstick at the New Hazlett Theatre.
Pria has taught theater and puppetry at The Pittsburgh Public Theater, where she also worked as a Critical Insight Fellow. She has written theatre criticism for American Theatre Magazine, and hopes to do so again.
More than anything, she really, really wants a job (in the arts!) so she can keep making plays.