Meet our grant recipients for WOW – Women of the World 2025–26

WOW Bangladesh Chapters  

WOW Bangladesh Chapters are place-based cultural platforms designed to convene communities and sustain dialogue at a regional level. 

Embodied Feminisms – From Writing to Stage 

Shadhona – A Centre for the Advancement of South Asian Culture  

Embodied Feminisms – From Writing to Stage, the WOW Bangladesh Chapter 2026 event, is a day-long festival concluding a four-month mentorship in feminist dance-theatre. Developed by Shadhona, it showcases performances and design processes rooted in care, consent, climate awareness, and intersectional knowledge. The initiative creates inclusive space for women and gender-diverse artists, translates everyday gendered experiences into embodied performance, and engages audiences and policymakers in dialogue on gender, creativity, and environmental justice. Structured as a five-phase learning cycle, it builds a sustainable feminist arts ecosystem, strengthens networks, and contributes to regional discourse on performance, resilience, and pluriverse cultural futures. 

Women, Climate, Heritage & AI: Empowering Voices for Resilient Futures 

COTAKE  

This project explores the intersection of women’s empowerment, climate resilience, cultural heritage, and emerging technologies in Bangladesh. It creates an inclusive platform where women and girls engage in critical dialogue on climate change, social narratives, and digital participation while gaining creative and technological skills. By integrating ecofeminist perspectives with AI-driven creativity, the initiative strengthens women’s agency, preserves cultural identity, and promotes adaptive knowledge for a changing climate. The project ultimately aims to amplify women’s voices, challenge limiting social perceptions, and foster sustainable, community-led innovation through learning, discussion, and creative expression. 

Roots to Wings: Heritage Guiding Young Voices 

Green Milieu  

Roots to Wings – Heritage Guiding Young Voices is a youth-led WOW Bangladesh Chapter event in Bandarban, organised by Green Milieu to celebrate Indigenous culture, creativity, and gender-inclusive leadership. The project creates a dynamic platform where Indigenous youth engage in intergenerational dialogue under the sacred Boto tree, participate in hands-on cultural and digital skills workshops, and showcase artistic performances and exhibitions. Blending traditional knowledge with modern storytelling and environmental advocacy, the initiative amplifies young voices—especially girls and young women—while fostering cultural preservation, climate awareness, and community collaboration. The project strengthens networks, promotes inclusion, and inspires sustainable youth-led action in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. 

WOW Bangladesh Commissions 

WOW Bangladesh Commissions support artist-led projects that advance critical artistic practice, foreground under-represented voices and expand public conversations around gender equity. 

Sowing Seeds  

Alyesha Choudhury   

Sowing Seeds is a feminist climate research project responding to riverbank erosion in Bangladesh. Led by architectural researcher Alyesha Choudhury, with collaborators filmmaker Hyeongji Yang and ceramicist Megan Devlin, the project develops practical, low-cost soil stabilisation methods using locally available materials and women’s ecological knowledge. Through participatory workshops with women from erosion-affected communities and garment workers, clay, discarded textiles, and vetiver grass seeds are tested as biodegradable erosion-control systems. Cyanotype printing functions as a feminist mapping tool, documenting seed placement, labour, and lived experience. Centring skill exchange and collective authorship, Sowing Seeds proposes community-led, replicable methods for climate resilience. Outcomes include riverbank workshops, installations, documentation, and an open-source methods booklet. 

Tobuo Jege Uthi  

Spardha Independent Theatre Collective   

Tobuo Jege Uthi by Spardha Independent Theatre Collective explores women’s experiences within patriarchal systems. Using experimental movement and mostly non-verbal storytelling, it examines how women’s bodies, choices, and identities are socially shaped, while emphasizing resilience and agency.  

For WOW Bangladesh Chapter 2026, the production will be staged as a one-day event in Chattogram, Sylhet, and Rajshahi. Each performance will include a facilitated discussion with students and young audiences, encouraging dialogue on gender norms, social pressures, and women’s agency. The project uses theatre as a catalyst for reflection and community conversation across regions. 

Project Ladyland 

HerStory Foundation   

A participatory theatre production inspired by Sultana's Dream to be staged in Dhaka and Chattogram. Written by a group of diverse writers, the story takes place in Ladyland, 121 years after Sultana's first visit. The play will engage the audience to share their views and opinions which will be the basis of an essay on alternative future visions.  

The Tale of the Soil  

Palash Bhattacharjee   

The project emerges from the intersection of memory and domesticity, presenting the narratives of the mothers in my family. The narrative will begin and end with the interior and surroundings of a visible, fragile mud house. This traditional mud house in a village about twenty-nine kilometres from Chattogram city, which is now the last remaining symbol of a declining agricultural economy, is what I want to place at the heart of my project. The installation, which merges digital collage and found objects with several videos, will be exhibited as the outcome of this project.  

Embryonic Shifts  

Saiqa Shabnam Chowdhury  

Embryonic Shifts is a stroboscopic sculptural “moving-image” installation that uses flashing light and classic animation principles to create an illusion of continuous motion. A STE(A)M project - the piece visualises how biological sex develops through probability and variation, rather than fixed binaries.  Electronics and mechanics bring the structure to life, allowing sculptures to animate when the light pulses in sync with its rotational motion.  Embryonic Shifts presents gender, not as a political debate, but as a natural feature of biology as determined by natural systems inside the body.  

Cosmic HerStory  

Center for Astronomy, Space Science and Astrophysics, Independent University, Bangladesh   

Cosmic HerStory is an eight-month public engagement programme. It tackles the underrepresentation of women in astronomy by creating safe, women-led dark-sky observation camps. Young women are trained in astrophotography, capturing images that act as both scientific records and personal narratives. The project culminates in an interactive VR/AR-enhanced exhibition at the WOW event, featuring hands-on telescope workshops and mentorship circles. Ultimately, it empowers girls in STEAM and reshapes the cultural assumption that astronomy is an exclusively male-dominated domain.   

Dialogues in Coexistence: Shaping Inclusive Public Spaces of Care in the Bengal Delta  

Saiqa Iqbal Meghna, Suvro Sovon Chowdhury   

Dialogues in Coexistence is an interdisciplinary art–architecture project exploring how feminist ethics, climate responsiveness, and public participation can shape inclusive civic spaces in the Bengal Delta.

Led by architects Saiqa Iqbal Meghna and Suvro Sovon Chowdhury, the project positions architecture as care, transforming design into a deep and immersive platform for coexistence across gender, community, and ecology. Phase One at Bengal Shilpalay develops immersive, monsoon-responsive installations with workshops for artisans, students, and women-led craft communities. Phase Two relocates selected structures to a public place in Dhaka city (preferably Mirpur Zoo), creating temporary shelters, breastfeeding pods, and contemplative spaces, demonstrating tangible, gender-inclusive, and climate-adaptive interventions in public life. 

To Whom It May Concern  

NINAD  

To Whom It May Concern is a 25–30 minutes immersive performance that transforms women’s real, anonymous letters about everyday gendered harassment into a shared artistic experience. Through spoken-word readings, collective vocalizations, projected text, and live sound, the work reveals how harassment and silence shape daily life. Women’s testimonies are interwoven with men’s reflective voices, highlighting gaps in awareness. The performance moves from isolated whispers to collective resistance, surrounding audiences with suspended letters and text fragments. Afterward, the space remains an interactive installation where audience members can anonymously contribute their own letters, expanding a living archive of shared stories.  

The Women’s Bioscope  

Jennifer Reid   

The Women’s Bioscope is a participatory arts project reimagining the traditional bioscope as a platform for displaced women’s voices in contemporary Bangladesh. Through songwriting, storytelling and visual performance, the project will travel to three locations in Bangladesh, culminating in public performances that foreground women’s everyday labour, resilience and creativity.  

algo-rhythmic-bodies  

Sharmillie Rahman   

“algo-rhythmic-bodies” is a multidisciplinary exhibition examining the uneasy entanglement of human and algorithmic architectures. Through photography, time-based media and installations, it traces how mediated bodies are shaped within networked environments. Grounded in a process-based curatorial approach and supported by mentorship programmes, the project brings together ten practitioners to explore how identities are reconstructed, circulated, surveilled, and commodified through data flows, interfaces, and techno-capitalist logic. Rather than opposing the real and the virtual, it probes their friction where bodily rhythms meet machine time, where repetition falters, and where disengagement disrupts control. Expanding across Dhaka and Chattogram, the exhibition keeps open a central question: can technology ever fully subsume embodied agency?