Nisha Sharma (actor)

Sharma was born in 1971 in Kathmandu.^{[citation needed]} She met Sunil Pokharel and Badri Adhikari while she was still at school. They had cast her sister as the lead in their production and they wanted a girl to play her sister. She was cast despite her sister's worries that the job would distract her from her studies.^[1]

She has had a career of more than thirty years in Nepali theatre and she has appeared in about fifty different productions.^[2]

In 2010 the South Asian Women's Theatre Festival took place in Delhi and several plays were staged.^[3] Sharma played the main character of Nora in a Nepali adaptation of Henry Ibsen's feminist play A Doll's House. The translated play, Putaliko Ghar, had been adapted by Sunil Pokharel from Henry Ibsen's original. The play was seen by Nepali nationals or those with a Nepali heritage. The important theme of the play is that Nora finally gives up on her husband in order that she can have her own life.^[4]

In 2023 she was chosen as the Chancellor of the Nepal Academy of Music and Drama (NAMUDA). She was promoted from Head of Drama in a move that surprised her. She became NAMUDA's first woman Chancellor.^[1] She took the oath of office on 16 February 2024 together with two other chancellors in a ceremony with the Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal.^[5] She identified the need for the academy to establish an international position and she also planned to create a library of Nepali folk music and plays. The job was important and she set aside other commitments to concentrate on this role for the four years of her term.^[1]