The CUNY Baccalaureate Blog

Kayhan Irani: Theater and Social Change, B.A., June 2008; Sumasil Foundation Scholarship; Diego Hidalgo Scholarship for the Arts; FEZANA Arts Scholarship; ZAGNY Scholarship; Weston Community Engagement Fellowship; Thomas W. Smith Academic Fellowship; Kaye Arts and Humanities Fellowship; Fali Chothia Charitable Trust Scholarship; Dean’s List.

Kayhan Irani considers herself an “artivist,” fusing theater with activism and social change to activate audiences and transform society.

After graduating from the High School of Performing Arts, Irani longed for a way to combine her passion for the theater with her desire to make the world a better place. She dropped out of college after her first year to try to find a field that would satisfy her. In 2003 she created a one-woman show, We’ve Come Undone, which highlights the lives of immigrant women post 9/11, combining contemporary performance with participatory theater to engage audiences in political and social change. She has performed the show nationally and internationally for universities, non-profit organizations and at theater festivals. She then became a practitioner and trainer of the techniques of Theater of the Oppressed, a participatory form of social change theater developed by the Brazilian director and activist Augusto Boal. In 2004 Irani led theater workshops in occupied Iraq with Childhood’s Voices and Happy Families, two organizations teaching and healing children through the arts. After this immersion in using the arts for social change, Irani decided to return to the university to integrate her experiences with scholarship and research.

While in CUNY BA she was awarded an Asia Pacific Performance Exchange Fellowship at UCLA where she worked with artists from Asia and the U.S. She was awarded a grant from the International Center for Tolerance Education to train ESL teachers in how to use interactive theater to support ESL learning. Working with The Point, a community organization and cultural center in the South Bronx, she wrote and developed a children’s play about asthma and civic pride called Jackie ‘n’ the Beanstalk which combines theater with circus and aerial acrobatics. She was part of a team of educators and artists working on a three-year project with the Barnard College Education Program that created a curriculum to teach about race and racism through storytelling and the arts.

In 2007 Irani was awarded a certificate of recognition by Mayor Bloomberg as part of Immigrant History Week for her work in immigrant communities. She has led theater programs at public schools, for community groups, at juvenile detention facilities, for government agencies and with the general public and is often invited to present her work at major conferences.

She recently co-edited a volume of essays entitled Telling Stories to Change the World: Global Voices on the Power of Stories to Build Community and make Social Justice Claims, about projects around the world that use storytelling as a way of creating social justice, released in May 2008 by Routledge. Currently she is a writer and the Director of Outreach for an ESL TV show produced by the Mayor’s Office of Adult Education and CUNY; this is a project she volunteered for through her Weston Fellowship.

Irani’s degree was constructed with courses in Theater, Political Science, Media Studies, Anthropology and Urban Studies at Brooklyn, Hunter and City Colleges and CUNY’s School of Professional Studies, working with Profs. John Krinsky, Political Science, City and Dale Byam, Theater, Brooklyn.