Shayok Misha Chowdhury is an Obie Award-winning director and Whiting Award-winning writer. His playwriting debut, Public Obscenities, was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. The bilingual play, in Bangla and English, was a New York Times Critic's Pick and named Best Theater of 2023 by The New Yorker. It premiered at Soho Rep as a co-production with the National Asian American Theatre Company and went on to encore runs at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company and Theatre for a New Audience.

Chowdhury is also the recipient of a Princess Grace Award, The Mark O’Donnell Prize, Drama Desk and Drama League nominations, a Jonathan Larson Grant, and the Relentless Award for his musical How the White Girl Got Her Spots and Other 90s Trivia, a collaboration with composer Laura Grill Jaye. Other recent collaborations include Brother, Brother with Aleshea Harris, SPEECH with Lightning Rod Special, and MukhAgni with Kameron Neal. He was also a collaborator on the Grammy Award-winning album Calling All Dawns.

A two-time Sundance Fellow, Chowdhury is the creator of Vicitra, a series of short films rooted in queer South Asian imagination. A Kundiman, Fulbright, and NYSCA/NYFA fellow, his poems have been published in The Cincinnati Review, TriQuarterly, Hunger Mountain, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Asian American Literary Review, and elsewhere. He is currently working with his physicist mother on a new project, Rheology, that will premiere at The Bushwick Starr, in April 2025, as a co-production with HERE Arts Center and Ma-Yi Theater Company.