When Deepa Mann-Kler talks about menopause, she doesn’t lower her voice. She doesn’t frame it as a quiet medical milestone or an inevitable diminishment. Instead, she calls it what it felt like: disorientating, destabilizing and ultimately, revolutionary.
Mann-Kler’s latest work, The Baby Factory Is Closed, set to premiere at South by Southwest (SXSW) 2026 as part of its XR Experience Competition, is a 20-minute virtual reality experience that places audiences inside the body of Zoraan, a British-born Sikh woman navigating menopause amid climate crisis, surveillance culture and inherited medical bias. But to understand the fire behind the piece, you have to understand the woman who made it.
Politics, policy and the power of storytelling
Mann-Kler’s life has always been shaped by movement- geographical, political and emotional. Born in India, she spent her early years moving between Calcutta, Delhi and Chandigarh before her family eventually settled in the UK.
Leicester became home, but her worldview was already expansive. Her parents were formidable influences: her mother a trade union representative and BBC radio performer, her father a Labour councillor who later became Lord Mayor. Their house pulsed with debate, activism and community.
“Knowledge is power,” she was told repeatedly growing up. And knowledge, she learned early, would not be optional.
At the London School of Economics, she studied Social Policy, later completing postgraduate work in European Social Policy before building a career in equality advocacy. One of her most formative professional chapters came in Northern Ireland, where she authored the first report on racism in the region. Working closely with Indian, Chinese, Vietnamese and Pakistani communities, she documented lived experiences of exclusion from healthcare, policing and education.
It was there that she sharpened her understanding of storytelling as a catalyst. Data informs. Story transforms.
For over a decade she worked in equality, married, raised two children, and gradually began to explore a parallel creative life as a painter. Then grief interrupted everything. After her father’s death in 2016, she found herself unable to paint. The silence was heavy.
The turning point came in Iceland. Inside an immersive installation by Björk at Reykjavik’s Harpa Concert Hall, Mann-Kler experienced virtual reality for the first time. Music, image and embodiment merged. “For a moment,” she said, “my grief lifted.” It was enough and she founded her company, Neon, and soon after premiered her first VR project at SXSW.
She has been working at the intersection of art, empathy and technology ever since and all her projects share a through-line: immersive storytelling in service of social equity.
Reclaiming the body as rebellion
Menopause was different. It was personal.
Now approaching 57, Mann-Kler speaks candidly about her own perimenopausal years: the anxiety that arrived without warning, the brain fog that made simple tasks feel mountainous, the creeping sense that her body had turned traitor. “I was shocked by how little I understood,” she admits. “And I’m someone who researches everything.”
The ignorance unsettled her almost as much as the symptoms. Rather than approaching the subject as a problem to be solved, Mann-Kler approached it as a narrative to be reclaimed.
In ‘The Baby Factory Is Closed’, menopause becomes insurgent terrain. Zoraan, the protagonist, is furious, funny, sharp-tongued and unashamed. The audience does not watch her struggle; they inhabit it.
The title itself is a provocation. A challenge to the idea that a woman’s value peaks at reproduction.
As artificial intelligence and immersive technologies increasingly shape global culture, Mann-Kler is determined that women not only participate but lead. She sees virtual reality as a space that has, in many ways, welcomed diverse voices — storytellers from different ethnicities, abilities and identities using immersion to reframe dominant narratives. But she remains cautious about AI, particularly around biased datasets that risk entrenching gender and racial inequalities.
“It’s not enough to be in the room,” she says. “We have to shape the systems from the ground up.”
If there is a single thread that runs through Deepa Mann-Kler’s life, from a politically charged childhood in Leicester to international festival premieres, it is this: refusal. Refusal to accept invisibility. Refusal to accept silence. Refusal to accept that biology dictates value.
The Baby Factory is Closed is one of four women-led immersive projects being premiered at SXSW as part of Future Art and Culture, the award-winning programme curated and produced by UK-based British Underground, with funding from Arts Council England and additional support from British Council.
