Suhaila Meera (she/her) is a director, dramaturg, and scholar whose research traces the planetary stakes of mass displacement through figurations of the child refugee. Her current book project, Playing Children: Displacement and the Performance of Childhood , offers a transregional study of theatrical and cinematic representations of children navigating national borders in and beyond South Asia and the Middle East. Her writing has appeared in Performance Research , Studies in South Asian Film & Media , Women’s Studies , Theatre Journal and Theatre Topics. She recently adapted and directed Bhisham Sahni’s Pali at Stanford University and was the dramaturg for Yilong Liu’s PrEP Play, or Blue Parachute at the New Conservatory Theatre Center.
Academic Credentials
PhD Stanford University 2023; BA Cornell University 2013
Research
Suhaila is the recipient of a 2025 ACLS Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). ACLS Fellowships support outstanding scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.
Her research explores how mainstream media’s spotlight on children has ignited debates around notions of innocence, deservingness, and citizenship against the backdrop of an ever-escalating global refugee situation. How and why have children become main characters in the grand drama of contemporary displacement, and what might their performances reveal of borders, belonging, and the world they will inherit? “The Child at the Border” examines cultural works from South Asia and the Middle East, analyzing how they both reflect and challenge the violent logic through which nation-states render some children displaced, or “out of place”- while these children play their assigned roles strategically.
Public Writing and Media Commentary
Suhaila’s article “Children and/as Puppets in Hansol Jung’s Wolf Play” was published in the November 2025 issue of Theatre Topics.
Meera, Suhaila. “Children and/as Puppets in Hansol Jung’s Wolf Play.” Theatre Topics, vol. 35 no. 3, 2025, p. 175-187. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tt.2025.a974456.
Abstract
At the top of Hansol Jung’s Wolf Play (2019), a six-year-old South Korean boy is handed off from one US-based adoptive family to another. Jung writes child protagonist Wolf as played by shifting configurations of an adult actor “of East Asian descent” and an “Asian boy doll,” also referred to as a “puppet.” Drawing on her own experiences directing this play in 2024, the author explores how Wolf’s puppet/doll helps Wolf confront the racialized aspects of his identity, process and communicate his trauma, and reclaim his life story. Puppets/dolls, the essay argues, are uniquely equipped to illustrate the deeply fraught nature of representing children’s difficult experiences onstage. In fact, when children are played by puppets/dolls, form serves as more than a container for content—it becomes its ideal reflection.
