Author Picture

Leesa Gazi is a writer, actor and co-founder of a London based theatre and arts company, Komola Collective. She was the script-writer and performer of ‘Six Seasons’ and ‘A Golden Age’ at the Southbank Centre. She worked as a script interpreter for the 2012 Globe festival on 'The Tempest. She was the cultural coordinator and a voice artist for Akram Khan’s ‘Desh' & ‘Chhotto Desh'. Leesa’s new play ‘Daughter of the Forest’ produced by Komola Collective completed its Spring-Summer tour in 2016. Leesa has been working as a playwright, researcher and translator of the “Portrait of Baul” project by Enamul Hoque & Openvizor in partnership with British Library & Barbican. Leesa has translated Tahmima Anam’s debut novel ‘A Golden Age’ in 2008. Her first novel, 'Rourob' or 'Hellfire", was published in 2010 in Bangla in Bangladesh by Sucheeptra.

Leesa was the concept-developer, co-writer and performer of ‘Birangona: Women of War’ theatre production, nominated for The Offies 2014. Birangona means ‘Brave Woman’ and this was the honorific granted to the hundreds of thousands of survivors of the campaign of rape carried out by the Pakistani Army and their local collaborators in the Liberation war of Bangladesh in1971. The play interwove film footage by the individual Birangona women. The play completed its UK and Bangladesh tour in 2014. 

Leesa recently directed the multi-award-winning documentary film, Rising Silence, that sheds light on the lives of sexual violence survivors in the aftermath of the Liberation War of Bangladesh. Currently she is working on her feature film ‘A House Named Shahana’ based on one of her published short stories.