Suba दास

Suba Das is a theatre, opera and dance director currently working freelance, commissioning new work and collaborating with companies across the UK and beyond. His most recent production was Maggie & Me for the National Theatre of Scotland — the world-premiere stage adaptation of Damian Barr’s memoir, which opened at the Tron in Glasgow in May 2024 and toured Scotland and England through that summer.

He has led two of the country’s most distinctive theatre organisations. From 2019 to 2022 he was Artistic Director and Chief Executive of HighTide, the new-writing company based in Suffolk. From 2022 to 2023 he was Creative Director of the Liverpool Everyman & Playhouse Theatres, where his programming included the 40th-anniversary production of Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls — re-imagined in collaboration with Churchill and transposed to Liverpool L8 — and a record-breaking rock’n’roll panto. Before HighTide he spent seven years as Associate Director at Curve in Leicester, overseeing artist development and community engagement and directing world premieres including Ishy Din’s Wipers, Purva Naresh’s Pink Sari Revolution and the European premiere of Shiv by Aditi Brennan Kapil. In 2017 he made his opera debut directing the world premiere of Ravi Shankar’s only opera, Sukanya, for the Royal Opera and the London Philharmonic; it was revived at the Southbank in 2020.

He read English at Clare College, Cambridge, specialising in Toni Morrison, Samuel Beckett and Shakespeare in performance, and trained on the Birkbeck MFA in Theatre Directing and as Resident Director at the National Theatre Studio and English Touring Theatre. He is a 2023 graduate of the National Film and Television School’s Directors’ Series.

His work is rooted in new writing, South Asian voices in British theatre, site-specific staging and the meeting point of opera, dance and drama. He has served as a Trustee of the Theatres Trust (appointed by the Secretary of State, 2022–2025), the North Music Trust — which operates The Glasshouse International Centre for Music and the Royal Northern Sinfonia — and the Coram Shakespeare Schools Foundation.