Nilaja Sun
Nilaja Sun
Nilaja Sun is an actress, playwright, and a teaching artist from the Lower East Side in New York City. Sun has taught theatre in New York City public schools since 1998 and is best known for her award-winning one-person play, No Child... and Pike St. She is half Puerto Rican and half African-American.
"…My pieces come from people and feelings and life rather than research. During my life, I’m listening and feeling, and I’m also calibrating the emotions in the room and asking people about their lives, and from there I go into creating. I wouldn’t be able to do research and then create a piece. It would be so flat. It would be filled with ideas and not emotion. Mine is more of an emotional based work."
"As an American, I always want to create work that reminds the world that people of colour have been great contributors to American history, culture, and tradition and that our stories exist and matter."
"…New York. Invisible New Yorkers. Folks that aren’t talked about in the theatre as much. Love. Instead of love it’s more like service. Service to one another. Death always seems to follow every show I do. It’s really life and death…"
