Sushma Joshi

Sushma Joshi
Born May 26, 1973
Kathmandu, Nepal
Occupation Writer filmmaker
Nationality Nepali
Genre Fiction and non-fiction
Notable works End of the World
Website
www.sushmasfiction.blogspot.com

Sushma Joshi (Nepali: सुष्मा जोशी) (born May 26, 1973) is a Nepali writer and filmmaker based in Kathmandu, Nepal.

End of the World, her book of short stories, was long-listed for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award[1] in 2009. "The Prediction" was published in 2013. Art Matters, a book of essays about contemporary art, was supported by the Alliance Française de Katmandou.

Her non-fiction reportage has appeared in Utne Reader, Ms. magazine, Z Net, The Irrawaddy, Himal Southasian, Bertelsmann Future Challenges, The Kathmandu Post, Nation Weekly magazine and other publications. In 2004, she was part of the staff at the Nation Weekly magazine (Kathmandu.)

Since 1997, Joshi has worked and consulted with international organizations working in social change and human rights, including the Harvard School of Public Health (Harvard University), UNDP, UNICEF, Integrated Center for Mountain Development (ICIMOD), Chemonics/USAID, and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).

Plays

Her play, I Killed My Best Friend's Father, about two teenagers who survive the civil conflict in Nepal, was stage-read at the Arcola Theatre in London as part of the Kali TalkBack Festival[2] on December 8, 2012.

Film

Sound of Silence (1997) her first documentary, was screened at the New Asian Currents[3] at the Yamagata Documentary Film Festival. Water (2000) was screened on the Q and A with Riz Khan on CNN International, and the UN World Water Forum in Kyoto. The Escape (2006),[4] a short about a teacher targeted by rebels, was accepted to the Berlinale Talent Campus. Supportive Men is a 30 minute short about men helping with housework in southern Nepal. Her films have also been screened at Flickerfest Film Festival in Sydney, Vancouver Nepali Film Festival, Himalayan Film Festival in London and others.

Art

In 2004, Joshi had a solo exhibit of her paintings at Gallery Nine. The exhibit was of 26 figurative paintings depicting the state of Nepal during the civil conflict.

Joshi's multimedia installation titled Jumla: A cyberphoto installation was accepted to the Eighth International Symposium of Electronic Art (ISEA) at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1997.

Creative history

Education and influences

Joshi was born and grew up in Kathmandu. From age 8 to 12, she studied in Dowhill School, Kurseong, in the district of Darjeeling. She finished her education at Mahendra Bhawan and Siddhartha Vanasthali High School in Kathmandu.

Joshi graduated from Brown University in the USA in 1996 with a BA in international relations. She also took workshops in fiction, autobiography and poetry, and classes in documentary production with the artist Tony Cokes. From 1999–2002, she was in graduate school at the New School of Social Research in New York, where she received an MA in anthropology. During the summers, she attended The Breadloaf School of English at Middlebury College, Vermont, and received another MA in English Literature in 2005. At Bread Loaf, she studied playwriting with the 1998–1999 Obie Award winning playwright Dare Clubb, as well as theatre directing and acting with Alan and Carol MacVey.

Joshi received a writer fellowship to attend the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in 2000. In 2005, she received a research and writing fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. She was awarded a residency at the Bellagio Center, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, in Bellagio, Italy, in 2006. Joshi was a featured writer at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in 2009. In 2011, she was an Asia fellow and traveled to Thailand and Burma to do research on a book about Nepali migrants, with support from the Asian Scholarship Foundation.

Joshi was a jury member of the Indigenous Film Festival in Nepal in 2009. She was also a member of a three-judge panel for the film competition on global warming sponsored by the British Council and Department for International Development in Kathmandu in 2010.

Selected published articles and stories

See also

References

External links