Can I walk in the park after dark? Can I be safe on the street at the stroke of midnight? These are simple questions that theatre artist Maya Krishna Rao asks in a 35-minute monologue called the ‘Walk’, which she devised in response to the gangrape and murder in Delhi in December 2012.


Actor, director, writer, educator and activist, Maya Krishna Rao is recognized as an original, innovative, and vastly talented creator of theatre today. A founder-member of the street theatre group Theatre Union, she was Associate Professor at National School of Drama from 1985 to 1990, and has been visiting faculty at the School since then. A member of NCERT's National Curriculum Framework Committee, she has drafted a drama syllabus for Classes I to XII.

A Doordarshan film was made on her work in 1997, titled Portrait of Maya Krishna Rao. She has been featured in Women Who Dared , a book on twenty notable Indian women of the last fifty years, published by the National Book Trust. She was recently felicitated with the Sangeet Natak Akademi award.