NYC PREMIERE POST SHOW CONVERSATION SPEAKERS
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 5TH
SIVAN BATTAT - DIRECTOR OF NEW WORK DEVELOPMENT, NOOR THEATRE
Sivan Battat (she/they) is a theatre director & community organizer, and the Director of New Work Development at Noor Theatre. Recent credits include: Wish You Were Here (Yale Rep), Backstroke Boys (Fault Line), Layalina (World Premiere, Goodman), Heroes of the Fourth Turning (Studio), Brass Knuckles (Ensemble Studio Theatre), Trouble in Mind (AD, Broadway) sivanbattat.com (http://sivanbattat.com/)
LEILA BUCK - WRITER, ACTOR, FACILITATOR AND EDUCATOR
Leila Buck is a Lebanese American writer, actor, facilitator and educator who has lived, performed, and taught theatrical tools for literacy, conflict resolution, and intercultural engagement to students, educators, corporate trainers, aid workers, community organizers and UN delegates across the U.S., Europe, China, Australia and 11 Arab countries. Writing highlights: American Dreams (dir. Tamilla Woodard; Cleveland Public Theater; Salt Lake Acting Co., ASU-Gammage - 2021 Drama League nomination, Outstanding Interactive Online Theater), In the Crossing (dir. Shana Gold; Public Theater Emerging Writers Group, Culture Project, NYTW, Brooklyn Museum), Hkeelee: Talk to Me (Mosaic Theater at Arena Stage; State Dept. Speaker Specialist tour Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Spain). Acting highlights: Aftermath (NYTW, international tour – Drama league nomination); Hkeelee (Talk to Me) (Mosaic Theatre @Arena Stage); Scorched (Wilma Theater, Barrymore award). Publications: American Theatre; Stages of Resistance; Innovation in Five Acts; Etching Our Own Image: Voices from the Arab American Art Movement; Four Arab-American Plays. Adjunct professor, NYU; TCG Fox Fellow; Usual Suspect – NYTW; Inaugural Emerging Writers Group- Public Theater. Contact: bblickers@independentartistgroup.com
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 7TH
KINAN AZMEH - COMPOSER / CLARINETIST, IPHIGENIA POINT BLANK
Hailed as a “virtuoso, intensely soulful" by the New York Times and "spellbinding" by the New Yorker. Syrian-born, Brooklyn-based genre-bending composer and clarinetist Kinan Azmeh has been touring the globe with great acclaim as a soloist, composer and improviser. He has collaborated with Yo-Yo Ma, Daniel Barenboim, John McLaughlin, Aynur and Djivan Gasparian, among others. He leads his own bands Hewar and the Kinan Azmeh CityBand. He is a Silkroad ensemble artist with whom he won a Grammy in 2016. His recent orchestral album Uneven Skywith the Deutsches Symphony Orchestra Berlin has won Germany’s OpusKlassik Award in 2019. Recent commissions include works for the New York Philharmonic, the Seattle Symphony and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra among others. He is a graduate of The Juilliard School, the Damascus High Institute of Music, and Damascus University’s School of Electrical Engineering, Kinan holds a doctorate in music from the City University of New York. His first opera, Songs For Days To Come which fully sung in Arabic was premiered in Germany in June 2022 to a great success. And he has recently been appointed to the United States National Council For the Arts.www.kinanazmeh.com
KEVORK MOURAD - VISUAL ARTIST, SAILING TO NOWHERE
Kevork Mourad was born in Kameshli Syria, received his degree from the Yerevan institute of Fine Art, and now lives in New York. A painter and video artist, he has had his animated and live visuals performed around the world -at the Spoleto Festival in SC (2022), Korea National Opera in Seoul (2020), National Cathedral in DC (2020), Dutch Royal Palace for the Prince Claus Foundation (2016), Metropolitan Museum of Art NYC (2018), Aga Khan Museum in Toronto (2018), Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA (2018), Elb Philharmonie in Hamburg (2017), Tanglewood in MA (2016), National Sawdust in NYC (2016), MuCEM in Marseille (2015), and Lincoln Center NYC (2012), among many others. His work is in the permanent collection of Paris's Institut du Monde Arabe and the Spurlock Museum. The 2016 recipient of the Robert Bosch Stiftung prize. A member of YoYo Ma’s Silkroad ensemble, in the documentary The Music of Stranger. He has exhibited in galleries around the US, Europe and the Middle East, including the Asia Society Triennial, the Spurlock Museum, Illinois, the Paris Art Fair, the Rose Art Gallery, Boston, the Claude Lemand Gallery, Paris, Kuchling Galerie in Berlin, and Tabari Art Space, Dubai. He is represented by Galerie Tanit, Beirut, and Studio La Cittá, Verona.
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 8TH
MOHAMMAD BAZZI - DIRECTOR, KEVORKIAN CENTER, NYU
Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and an associate professor of journalism at New York University. From 2009 to 2013, he served as an adjunct senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He was also the 2008 Edward R. Murrow press fellow at CFR. Before joining the NYU faculty, Bazzi was the Middle East bureau chief at Newsday from 2003 to 2008, where he established bureaus in Baghdad and Beirut. He was the lead writer on the Iraq war and its aftermath. He also served as Newsday’s United Nations bureau chief and as a metro reporter in New York City. His essays and commentaries on the Middle East have appeared in The New York Times, London Review of Books, Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Boston Review, Politico Magazine, Reuters, and other publications.
FADI SKEIKER - THEATRE ARTIST AND PROFESSOR, FORDHAM
Fadi Skeiker is a theatre professor at Fordham University. Fadi is a theatre artist, a scholar, and an educator with a keen focus on theater's intersections with social justice and the experiences of diasporic communities.
Across his various roles—be it directing, leading theatre workshops, or conducting research—Fadi consistently strives to amplify the voices of historically marginalized and socially disadvantaged communities, particularly those who have been displaced or live within diasporic contexts. His impactful work spans multiple countries, including Jordan, Portugal, and Germany.
EDWARD ZITER - Professor of Theatre History, NYU
Edward Ziter is Professor of Theatre History in the Drama Department at NYU. He has written two books: Political Performance in Syria: From the June War to the Syrian Uprising and The Orient on the Victorian Stage. He edits the online peer-adjudicated journal Arab Stages. His current research focuses on the theatre of the Syrian Diaspora and on nationalist performance during the Arab Renaissance (the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries).
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 9TH MATINEE
BRUCE M. KING - PROGRAM Head. Language Learning & Critique PROGRAM, Brooklyn Institute
Bruce M. King’s teaching and research focuses on the ancient Greek and Roman world. He is especially engaged by anthropological, psychoanalytic, queer, comparative, and materialist approaches to the ancient world. He has published articles on Homer, the pre-Socratics, Sophocles, and Plato, as well as on reception history. He recently co-authored an article on the queer reception of Achilles and Patroclus, including in the tv show Hannibal and the video game “Hades.” Forthcoming work includes a book on the Iliad, entitled Achilles Unheroic, and a co-edited volume on radical materialism and the archaic Greek world. Bruce has a PhD in Classics from the University of Chicago; he has been a Fellow of the Center for Hellenic Studies (Washington DC) and of the Reid Hall Center for Scholars in Paris, as well as the Blegen Fellow at Vassar College.
LISA SCHLESINGER - PLAYWRIGHT, IPHIGENIA POINT BLANK
Lisa Schlesinger’s works for stage and radio include Iphigenia Point Blank, Celestial Bodies, Wal-martyrs, Same Egg, Manny and Chicken, Rock Ends Ahead, The Bones of Danny Winston, Twenty-One Positions: A Cartographic Dream of the Middle East (with Naomi Wallace and Abdel Fattah AbuSrour), In the Wake of the Graybow Riots. Winner of the BBC Playwriting Award, she has received commissions from the Guthrie Theatre, the BBC, Ensemble Studio Theatre, and fellowships from the NEA, TCG, CEC/Artslink, the Sloan Foundation, the International Writing Program among others. Produced nationally and internationally, her work is published in American Theatre Magazine, Performing Arts Journal, Broadway Plays, NoPassport, Playwrights Canada Press, the New York Times and elsewhere. Ruinous Gods, Lisa’s newest opera with composer Layale Chaker, is co-commissioned by Spoleto Festival USA, Wuppertal Opera, and Nederlandse Reisopera and will premiere at Spoleto Festival USA in May 2024. Lisa is co-director of the Iowa Playwrights Workshop at the University of Iowa.
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 9TH EVENING
HEATHER RAFFO - Playwright and Theatre Artist
Heather Raffo is a singular and outstanding voice in the American theater whose work has been championed by the New Yorker as “an example of how art can remake the world”. Having helped forge a new genre of Arab American theater, she’s spent her career writing and embodying stories of Iraq: from the lives and dreams of Iraqi women in her seminal work 9 Parts of Desire (2003), to the suicidal ideation of an Iraq war veteran in the opera Fallujah (2012), to the restless longings of an Iraqi refugee architect, in Noura (2018). A multi award-winning writer and actor, she’s toured nationally and internationally: from The Kennedy Center to The Aspen Ideas Festival and from London’s House of Commons to the U.S. Islamic World Forum. Her newly released anthology, Heather Raffo’s Iraq Plays: The Things That Can’t Be Said, brings together two decades of her most groundbreaking contributions to the American theater and speaks to the bravery required to be at the forefront of a movement.
HUSSEIN SMKO - Choreographer / Dancer, Iphigenia Point Blank
Hussein is a 25-year old Iraqi of Arab/Kurdish roots whose journey with dance started when he was nine years old during his 4th experience with war – he learned hip-hop dance from an American soldier stationed in the capital of Kurdistan in 2003. Hussein is a self-trained dancer/choreographer who has since taught himself breakdancing, house, capoeira, theater dance, acting, singing, martial arts and gymnastics. He began a residency with Battery Dance in NYC as the first recipient of the Adel Euro Campaign for Dancers Seeking Refuge in January of 2017. In addition to choreographing and performing in their seasons since, he has also taught master classes in NYC public schools, at the NY Public Library and at USC.