About
Narumol Thammapruksa — Kop to nearly everyone — is a theatre director, performer and mask maker based in Chiang Mai. Since 1994 the through-line of her work has stayed the same: theatre as a way of practising peace.
Beginnings
She was born in Bangkok and has built her whole career from the north — an unusual choice for an internationally active Thai artist, and a deliberate one. She began outside theatres altogether: in 1994 she was coordinating children’s drama in Chiang Mai schools and orphanages and a government-funded touring play on AIDS awareness. Through the choreographer Amie Dowling she was drawn into community movement workshops at the McKean leprosy rehabilitation centre and the New Life Center. Art made with people came first; stages came after.
Out into Asia
In the late 1990s she co-founded The International WOW Company with the American director Josh Fox {founding year}, performing and producing physical theatre between Chiang Mai, Bangkok and New York. In the same years Noda Hideki cast her in Akaoni (The Red Demon), his Japan–Thailand collaboration; she performed it in Tokyo, Bangkok and at Bunkamura {dates}. Tibet ran alongside: in 1998 she coordinated World Artists for Tibet at Project 304 in Bangkok and produced the Penpa Tsering concerts. A run of American fellowships followed in 1999 — an Asian Cultural Council grant in New York, the Asia Pacific Performance Exchange at UCLA, the American Dance Festival at Duke University.
The network years
The 2000s made her a connector. She directed Women Warrior Tales across Java and Bali in 2000, and that December managed the World Festival of Sacred Music in Chiang Mai — more than a hundred musicians from ten countries, in temple grounds. From 2002 to 2005 she was curator at the Chiang Mai University Art Museum. As artistic director of the Mekong Project (Dance Theatre Workshop, New York; Rockefeller Foundation) she worked across Chiang Mai, Luang Prabang and Cambodia in 2003–04. Three years inside the Setagaya Public Theatre’s Asian Contemporary Theatre Collaboration ended on stage in Hotel Grand Asia (Tokyo, 2005), and with Singapore’s The Necessary Stage she co-wrote and performed Mobile (2006), a four-country work about migration.
Out of workshops with the performance artist Dan Kwong in 2001 she developed an autobiographical writing-and-performing method she has taught across Taiwan, the Philippines, Japan and Thailand. Two plays came directly out of it: He-Me-She-It and Sound of the Ocean.
Peace as a discipline
An Asian Public Intellectuals fellowship (Nippon Foundation, 2008–09) took her to Japan and Indonesia to study how artists shape their cities. She completed an M.A. in English for Communication at Chiang Mai University in 2011; her research on aikido and the UNESCO model of peace education won the faculty’s Best Independent Study award and led to lectures at Brandeis University, Lancaster Seminary and the University of San Francisco. Aikido is not a sideline: she trains and teaches at the Renshinkan dojo in Chiang Mai, and its ethic — meet force without violence — runs under everything else. In 2014 she joined Salzburg Global Seminar’s Session 532 on conflict transformation through culture; in 2015 she spent a season in the United States as a Creative Fusion artist-in-residence with the Cleveland Foundation at the Rainey Institute. Since 2016 she has served on the committee of the Peace Culture Foundation in Chiang Mai.
Masks
Masks moved to the centre of the work in 2013 with Maya Yak (The Demon Hero) at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre — Nikorn Sae-Tang’s staging of a demon who gives himself up for peace. Research with Japanese and Indonesian colleagues, Asian Mask: Reconstruction and Reconfiguration, led to Ocean Blue Heart in Tokyo (2016–17). She has made masks and taught mask work ever since, most recently directing To Conceal is to Reveal at Haan Studio, Chiang Mai, in October 2025.
Home ground
In October 2020, at Wat Pha Lat on the forested slopes of Doi Suthep, she directed TERA เถระ — a TERASIA work on life, death and what remains, its audience walking the temple path. It travelled to Selasar Sunaryo Art Space in Bandung in 2024. The recent years root her at home: lecturer in the Faculty of Mass Communication at Chiang Mai University since {start year}, director of Chao Luang Kham Daeng for the Lanna Wisdom School’s thirtieth anniversary (2024, covered by Thai PBS), and of the Greek mask play Megara and Mekhala for International Women’s Day 2025.
In her words
{artist statement}
Education
B.Sc. Agricultural Extension, Chiang Mai University, 1993.
M.A. English for Communication, Chiang Mai University, 2011.
Peacebuilding, Payap University — {Ph.D. status}.