coLAB Arts, Inc.
Location: New Brunswick
Website: https://colab-arts.org/
Grant Round: 2025 Round 1
Award: Incubation / $15,000
Purpose: To support Shiv’s Project, an oral history archive and verbatim theater piece based on interviews with family, friends, and school officials who knew Shiv Kulkarni, a young boy in New Jersey, who took his own life.
coLAB Arts, in partnership with the Indian Heritage & Cultural Association-NJ and Shiv’s Third Eye, will produce an oral history archive and verbatim theater piece honoring the memory of Shiv Kulkarni, a New Jersey teenager who tragically took his own life by jumping off of the Vessel at New York City’s Hudson Yards in 2021.
The project will document interviews with Shiv’s family, friends, and mentors, exploring perceptions of mental health within New Jersey’s South Asian community and generational differences in addressing its importance. The oral histories will be transcribed, annotated, and made publicly accessible through coLAB Arts’ digital archive, serving as a resource for researchers, mental health professionals, and community organizations.
The project will culminate in a verbatim theater piece, written and directed by coLAB Arts producing director Dan Swern, to be presented at the 2025 IHCA-NJ Natya Darpan Theater Festival.
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