Syed Jamil Ahmed
Bangladeshi scholar and theatre designer
Syed Jamil Ahmed (born 7 April 1955) is a Bangladeshi scholar, theatre director, and founding chair of the Department of Theatre and Music at the University of Dhaka. He served as the Director General of Shilpakala Academy during 2024–2025. His most notable theatre productions include Kamala Ranir Sagar Dighi (1997), Ek Hazar Aur Ek Thi Rate (1998), Behular Bhasan (2004), Pahiye (2006) and Shong Bhong Chong (2009). He won Nandikar National Theatre Award of Calcutta and the B.V. Karanth Award of India's National School of Drama (NSD).
Ahmed announced his resignation from Shilpakala Academy on 28 February 2025 citing bureaucratic challenges and restrictions on artistic expression.
Early life and education
Ahmed was born in Dhaka on 7 April 1955. He joined the Liberation War in 1971 as a freedom fighter. The violence of the war impacted him, "having seen dead bodies rotting with gaping holes and the charred remains of abandoned homes, [for] having walked the streets of Dhaka city, clasping the clip of an unpinned grenade in [his] trousers pocket." Ahmed came in touch with an amateur theatre group named Dhaka Theatre in 1974 and began to consider theatre as a career. In 1975, Ahmed received a scholarship from the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR), and dropped out of English Literature BA (Hons) programme at the University of Dhaka to join the National School of Drama in New Delhi. Here, from 1975 to 1978, he studied for three years and worked as an apprentice fellow for another year, under Ebrahim Alkazi and B. V. Karanth.
“Syed Jamil Ahmed” enters the record as bangladeshi scholar and theatre designer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Syed, Jamil and Ahmed can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Syed Jamil Ahmed” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.