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.

She has created public theater across every corner of NYC - Hunts Point Riverside Park, Traver's Park, Queens Botanical Garden, Qahwah House Astoria, Washington Square Park, Newkirk Open Street, La Plaza Cultural, Lt. Frank McConnell Park, Rockaway Beach, the Astoria Food Pantry, Gowanus Dredgers Community Boathouse, PYO Chai, Edgemere Farm, Rockaway Community Park, 31st Avenue Open Street, PS Family NYC, and more if you let her!

Aside from Flood Sensor Aunty, her Culture Push project, she recently 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 an Asian American Writers Workshop Open City Fellow, and an inaugural New City Critics Fellow at the Urban Design Forum, writing about climate organizing, urban ecology, and the city’s peripheries. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Long Island, she is deeply involved in organizing in Nassau County, east Queens, and Rockaway.

PROJECT : FLOOD SENSOR AUNTY

Flood Sensor Aunty is about a flood sensor working at her aunt’s chai shop who really wants to be a movie star. Halfway between really funny devised theater and community disaster prevention, this show is about how the best way to protect yourself from flooding, climate change, and despair is through knowing your neighbors. This is designed for brown communities in Queens and Nassau County’s South Asian Indo Caribbean enclaves, in service of creating comedic public art that teaches communities about disaster preparedness – and so the free play was interspersed with disaster preparedness information about what to do in case of flooding, particularly for people who live in or have basements. We've had four free performances in chai shops and brown public spaces - PYO CHAI (Stewart Manor, Nassau), Qahwah House (Astoria), Lt. Frank McConnell Park (Richmond Hill), and Travers Park (Jackson Heights) - and audiences left with bellies full of (oat milk) chai, headlamps, zines with resources about flood protection, and laughs. This show was co-written with a team of fifteen devisers (partly performers with deep experience in movement and theater work and partly community organizers working and living in neighborhoods throughout NYC and LI that flood). 

This show is also dedicated to 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!!!

Photo Credits: Jesse Herndon, Cameron Blaylock, and Sarah Drepaul