Kalieaswari Srinivasan is an actor and writer based in Chennai, who works in India, Europe, Australia. She is an alumni of Berlinale Acting Studio. Her first film venture was the Cannes 2015 Palme D'or winner DHEEPAN directed by the French director Jacques Audiard, where she played the female protagonist, Yalini. In her next film, she played one of the three female leads in the film SIVARANJANIYUM INNUM SILA PENGALUM directed by Vasanth S Sai that premiered in the Mumbai Film Festival. It toured National and International Film Festivals garnering critical acclaim and awards. It has been creating conversations about gender equations in domestic spaces, which is the subject dealt with in the film.
Her recent theatre projects include the play, THE PRISONER, with the legendary theatre director Peter Brook and his long time collaborator Marie Hélène Estienne. The Prisoner, premiered at The Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris, March 2018, and had since then been on a year long world tour around Europe, the USA and the UK. She was also part of their presentation on THE TEMPEST at the Bouffes, in Feb, 2020. In December 2019, she was part of ON THE OTHER SIDE - Concert for Piano and Silences’, a work demonstration-created by Jubilo Foundation, co-financed by the City of Wroclaw, presented at the Grotowski Institute.
Her recent theatre work also had her playing the central character in THE JUNGLE AND THE SEA by S. Shaktiharan and Eamon Flack. As well as she played in the 2019 Adelaide season of COUNTING AND CRACKING produced by Belvoir theatre - Sydney, directed by Eamon Flack. BIRYANI directed by Jay Emmanuel, performed and co-written by her, was part of the Winter Arts Festival in Perth, July 2017. She has translated BATTLEFIELD - a play based on Le Mahabharata by Peter Brook, Marie Hélène Estienne and Jean Claude Carrière. Her translation in Tamil was published last year in AADII - a digital magazine for theatre. She was one of the international performers at FIGURE STUDIES : a performative installation bridging art, identity and fashion in June 2018, directed by Andrew Ondrejcak, a performance that was conceived in collaboration with the Ethical fashion initiative and its consecutive conception, KABUL TO BAMAKO - a collaborative piece of story-telling combining theatre and fashion, that closed the European Commission’s International Colloquium “Culture for the Future”, directed by Clara Bauer, both at BOZAR in Brussels.
During this pandemic, she was part of two featurettes, shot in a controlled atmosphere. BEGUM PARVATHI - directed by Radhika Prasidhha, has been selected to be screened in Short Film Festivals in Toronto, Mumbai, Seattle far this year, PABLO NERUDA - directed by Bagu, based on the last days of the Chilean Poet Neruda, has been declared the winner of season 5 of Indo French International Film Festival, 2021. She worked in RETTAI JADAI- directed by Franziska Schönenberger and Jayakrishnan Subramanian, which dealt with the stigma around menstruation. It won Awards at OSCAR® Qualifying festival BISFF Bengaluru and Tasveer Southasian Festival in Seattle. She is now part of UNE PIERRE DE PATIENCE adapted from ‘Syngué Sabur’, written by Atiq Rahimi, which won the prestigious ‘Prix Goncourt’. It is to be performed as part of Les Francophonies Festival at Limoges this year. Her next challenge as an artist is her first script for the feature film PAPER PLANE, which is based on a true story. She just got a script development grant by the Goethe Institut Chennai to travel to Munich in Germany for research.