About the Artist
Nehprii Amenii is a Brooklyn based stage director, playwright, puppeteer, and educator. As a theatre artist, she has a passion for personal narratives, puppetry, and grand-scale spectacle. She is known for creating experiences that dismantle the wall between players and audiences, enchant the imagination and inspire new ways of seeing and thinking. She is the founder and Artistic Director of Khunum Productions, a production and creative consulting company.
She has worked with Penumbra Theatre Company, The Flea, Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, Bushwick Starr, Iati Theatre, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Company, In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre, The Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre, Virginia Stage Company, Lumber Yard Performing Arts, Connecticut Repertory, Theatre The Holland Festival, The Minnesota Orchestra, Bread and Puppet Theatre, Fordham University at Lincoln Center, The Public Theatre, the New York Phil Harmonic at Lincoln Center, and Cirque Du Soleil. She has enjoyed over a decade of teaching and staging puppet performances for The Alvin Ailey American Dance Foundation’s AileyCamp, where her work has been featured on the stages of Miller theatre and New Jersey Performing Arts Center.
In 2010, she received a grant from Downtown Brooklyn Partnership to create an interactive exhibit and Community Arts Center based on her children's book "Memories of the Little Elephant." In 2011 she was sponsored by the International Rotary Club to create a story-telling exhibit in South East India. In 2013, she was honored with the Stanley and Evelyn Lipkin Prize for playwriting, for her original work, Food for the Gods. In 2015, Nehprii was invited as a U.S delegate to the Women Playwrights International Conference in Cape Town South Africa. And in 2018, she was recipient of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Creative Engagement Grant, and also awarded from the Puffin Foundation. She is a sponsored artist of the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2020, she was commissioned by The Movement Theatre Company, was recipient of the Puppet Showplace Black Puppeteer empowerment grant, artist in residence with Dixon Place Theatre, twice recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts. Most recently, Nehprii was selected as the Labworks artist fellowship with the New Victory Theatre.
As an educator and curriculum developer for over 20 years, she uses puppetry, multi-media arts and story telling to mentor teachers in curriculum differentiation and to teach English to young immigrants within New York public schools. She has also taught at Minneapolis Community and Technical college, Sarah Lawrence College, the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, and the University of Connecticut. In 2014, she launched Kids Creative Power, Khunum Productions’ Arts in Education division.
Nehprii Amenii has served on the advisory committee of the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry, is a member of The Playwrights Center, The Stage Directors and Choreographers Union and Foundation, and is a member of the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab. She has studied Cultural Anthropology with the International Khepran Institute, holds a B.A. in Creative Communications from the University of Minnesota, and an M.F.A in Theatre Production from Sarah Lawrence College.
