Sabina is a public theater artist, organizer, and urban planner who tells silly stories about our changing climate. As much as she loves sitting through (or organizing!) boring multi-hour workshops about climate resiliency, she sees public theater as an exciting strategy for meeting people where they’re at (like Rockaway Beach on a lazy Saturday afternoon in June) with resources, community, glitter, and fun.

Most recently, she wrote and directed A Fun Play about How Scary Climate Change Is, a site-specific performance about finding joy, not despair, in the face of climate change, across five waterfront spaces in NYC (supported by the Brooklyn Arts Council, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Amanda+James Coastlines Festival). She was a 2022 Artist in Residency at NYU and directed and co-wrote Rainy Day Play about climate change and flooding in Edgemere, Gowanus, and Harlem.

She is the co-founder and co-artistic director of Fresh Lime Soda Productions, a contemporary South Asian political theater ensemble and incubator. She is a public space programming partner with the Department of Transportation, and performs a bilingual children’s play about composting throughout open streets in Brooklyn and Queens. Earlier this year, she directed and wrote a collaborative performance for Make the Road’s May Day Protest in Washington Square Park with workers from DRUM, Local 79, and the Street Vendor Project.

She is a New City Critics Fellow at the Urban Design Forum, writing about climate organizing, urban ecology, and the city’s peripheries. Born and raised in Long Island, she is deeply involved in climate organizing in Nassau County, east Queens, and Rockaway.

PROJECT : FLOOD SENSOR AUNTY

Flood Sensor Aunty is a comedic public theater project about disaster preparedness, starring an anthropomorphic flood sensor making a career pivot to arthouse film and her friends. Designed as public education with and for brown aunties around Hillside Avenue and Jericho Turnpike, this will take place across late night chai and gossip spots, like Usha Foods in Bellerose or Motin Sweets in Jamaica.

Not only is Hillside Avenue and Jericho Turnpike home to one of the city’s largest South Asian enclaves, but also is the site of where the glaciers stopped 25,000 years ago. As a result, Hillside regularly floods each time it rains, but there is a lack of culturally competent emergency management. In come the Aunties (I’m using this term colloquially and affectionately): not only is aunty-gossip a great way to spread information about flooding (talk to me about how gossip is a strategy of climate emergency messaging), but also learn from our (used generously) South Asian/Indo Caribbean homelands, from Bangladesh (which produces the third most climate migrants in the world) to Pakistan (which is currently experiencing historic, unprecedented flooding) to the Caribbean (which routinely suffers coastal storm surge).

While aunties are purveyors for community knowledge about flooding and disaster prevention (who else is emptying out basements of water, packing rotis for when they know the power will go out, finding neighbors to stay with, checking in on elders?), I want to help arm aunties with disaster prevention resources: (1) how to know about when disasters will hit, (2) how to get funding from the city to repair destroyed apartments and homes, and (3) how to build communication networks with your neighbors. Also, fun!!!