Velani Dibba is a theater director and multidisciplinary artist whose work focuses on the collision of cultural mindsets. Born to Gambian and Tongan parents in Northern California, she grew up living with different guardians and moving between California, West Africa, Arizona, Naples, and Texas. As a child she studied a wide range of performance forms, including Polynesian hula, Neapolitan commedia del’arte, and West African dance. She went on to study International Relations at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service with a concentration in Culture & Politics, before attending Columbia University’s Directing MFA program as its youngest student in history. There she studied directing, opera, and composition under Anne Bogart, Juilliard’s Stephen Wadsworth, and David Henry Hwang respectively. During this time, Velani became an Inaugural Fellow at the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, which allowed her to continue exploring cross-cultural communication through theater while completing her graduate studies. Her work often explores political dilemmas through physical theater (movement, devised, circus); comedy (farce, parody, satire); and form-play (interactive, multimedia, design-centric). These storytelling methods are present in different ways across different cultures, and are useful for understanding both new work and classical texts. Today, Velani’s work explores the space between conflicting cultures by using physical theater, comedy, and form-play to tell familiar stories in new ways.