Artists Advancing Cultural Change Cohort

Cross-Medium Commissions are awarded annually to a cohort of writers, who, over the course of a year, develop a script in a medium of their choice (such as film, television, VR, etc.) designed to reach a mass audience. These artists, known as Noor’s Artists Advancing Cultural Change Cohort, conceptualize pieces that reflect their own experiences, address issues relevant to their respective communities, and pursue goals for social change. The program increases representation for artists of MENA descent in popular culture and empowers other artists to take a seat at the ever-widening table.

Noor Theatre’s third Artists Advancing Cultural Change Cohort is created with the generous support of Pop Culture Collaborative’s Becoming America Fund and the Mosaic Network and Fund in The New York Community Trust.

 

2021 Cohort

 
Photo by Mousa Kraish

Photo by Mousa Kraish

Jacob Kader

Jacob is a writer and producer. He co-wrote the film Abe, with Lameece Issaq, World Premiere at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. He made his Off-Broadway debut as Co-Author of Food and Fadwa at New York Theater Workshop in 2012 followed by productions and staged readings in Abu Dhabi, Beirut, Iowa, Michigan, and Minneapolis. His projects have received support and development grants from Sundance Institute/Jordan Film Commission, the Jerome Foundation, the Edgerton and Robert Sterling Clark Foundations. He is actively developing stories for stage and screens.  Jacob is researching and developing a play about the Palestinian-American civil rights activist, Alex Odeh, who was killed in 1985 when his offices in Santa Ana, California were firebombed, a case which went unsolved. Fundamentally, it is a story of a peaceful, family man whose life was cut short by political violence and extremism and also of the perils of supporting Palestinian and Arab causes in the United States.

Haleh Roshan

Photo by Britannie Bond

Photo by Britannie Bond

Haleh is an Iranian-American writer with hereditary neuropathy (CMT). Her work fuses leftist politics with intercultural narratives to challenge global power structures and trouble conceptions of identity and ability. Her plays A Play Titled After the Collective Noun for Female-Identifying 20-Somethings Living in New York City in the 2010s and FREE FREE FREE FREE are published by Dramatists Play Service. Previous pilots include Bellwether (2016 Austin Film Festival Second-Round Semi-Finalist) and The Legitimate (Screen Craft Quarter Finalist). Haleh’s commission is a pilot for The Rhizome, a show situated in a near, neoliberalized future, where climate collapse has become unignorable: The world’s wealthy have deployed all modern tools of militarized borders around cities of capitalist importance, violently defending continued resource extraction and enforcing climate displacement for the increasingly many disenfranchised. In interlocking but narratively unrelated episodes, The Rhizome examines historical, contemporary, and speculative futures of collective socio-ecological direct action, and reveals possibilities for organizing ourselves for climate resilience and ecological protection, outside state reliance.

Photo by Lisa Keating

Photo by Lisa Keating

Betty Shamieh

Betty is the author of fifteen plays. Her theatre productions include The Black Eyed (New York Theatre Workshop), Territories (EU Capital of Culture Festival), Fit for a Queen (The Classical Theatre of Harlem) and Roar (The New Group). A New York Times Critics’ Pick, Roar was the first play about a Palestinian American family produced off-Broadway and is widely taught at universities across the country. A graduate of Harvard College and the Yale School of Drama, Shamieh was awarded a Guggenheim and a Radcliffe Playwriting Fellowship. Shamieh is developing a new screenplay, As Soon As Impossible, based on her play that was commissioned from the Second Stage/Time Warner Commissioning program. A UNESCO Young Artist for Intercultural Dialogue, her works have been translated into seven languages.  Shamieh is currently the Mellon Foundation Playwright-in-Residence at the Classical Theatre of Harlem and a Visiting Artist at Stanford. www.bettyshamieh.com. For her commission, Shamieh will write Mecca of Comedy, an original half-hour television pilot about a raunchy Arab female comic trying to move her career forward while living in the midst of the extremely conservative Arab American community of Detroit, which is inspired by her play, Roar

Hadi Tabbal

Hady is a NY-based writer and actor, born and raised in Lebanon. Hadi was a resident playwright at Berkeley Rep’s GroundFloor program where he developed his first play The Remnants. His second play Icarus in Berytus was selected as a semi-finalist at Playwrights Realm in New York. As an actor, Hadi starred as Amir Al-Raisani in NBC’s drama The Brave. He has also had several other TV guest appearances. He will play the lead role in The Public Theater's production of Mona Mansour’s The Vagrant Trilogy (interrupted by the pandemic). Hadi is a member of the Middle Eastern Writers Group at The Lark Play Development Center and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at CUNY York College. Previously, he was an artistic associate with the Sundance Theater Institute. Hadi holds an M.F.A from The New School for Drama and is a past recipient of the Fulbright Grant. He is represented by A3 Artists Agency and The Kravitz Company. With Noor Theater’s Artists Advancing Cultural Change commission, Hadi will be working on his second play in his Beirut series, this time exploring the idea of modern colonialism; how the tension between donor countries and the global south trickles down to the relationship between a small group of people working in an American NGO in Lebanon. 

 

2020 Cohort

 
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SAHAR Jahani

Sahar is a first generation Iranian-American writer/director raised in Los Angeles. She earned a BA in Film & Media Studies and Literary Journalism from UC Irvine and an MFA in Film and Television Screenwriting from Stephens College. Sahar worked in scripted development at YouTube Originals before transitioning to the writers room on the Golden Globe winning Hulu/A24 series Ramy. In 2018, Sahar was selected to participate in the Film Independent Project Involve Program where she wrote and directed Just One Night, a short film that premiered at the LA Film Festival and has gone on to several other festivals around the world. Her original pilot, Uncovered, was awarded the 2019 MACRO Episodic Lab Grant and is in development with Executive Producer Eva Longoria. Most recently, Sahar was a writer on 13 Reasons Why (S4, Netflix) and is currently adapting the novel, Ayesha at Last, for Pascal Pictures. This past year, she was listed as one of Hollywood’s top new writers on the Tracking Board’s Young and Hungry list.

SYLVIA KHOURY

Sylvia is a New York-born writer of French and Lebanese descent. Her plays include Selling Kabul (Playwrights Horizons, Williamstown Theater Festival), Power Strip (LCT3), Against the Hillside (Ensemble Studio Theater) and The Place Women Go. She is currently under commission from Lincoln Center and Williamstown Theater Festival. Awards include the L. Arnold Weissberger Award and Jay Harris Commission and a Citation of Excellence from the Laurents/Hatcher Awards. She is a member of EST/Youngblood and a previous member of the 2018-2019 Rita Goldberg Playwrights’ Workshop at The Lark and the 2016-2018 WP Lab. Her plays have been developed at Playwrights Horizons, Williamstown Theater Festival, Eugene O’Neill Playwrights’ Conference, Roundabout Theater Underground, Lark Playwrights’ Week, EST/Youngblood, and WP Theater. She holds a BA from Columbia University and an MFA from the New School for Drama. She is a fourth-year student at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

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Heather Raffo

Heather is an award-winning playwright and actress whose work has been seen Off-Broadway, off West End, in regional theatres and in film. An American with Iraqi roots, her plays have been hailed by The New Yorker as “an example of how art can remake the world”.  Raffo is the author and performer of Noura (Weissberger Award, Helen Hayes Award for Best Original New Play), which premiered in D.C. before moving to Abu Dhabi, Cairo, NYC and theatres across the nation, and 9 Parts of Desire (Lucille Lortel Award, Blackburn commendation) which ran Off-Broadway for nine months and has played across the U.S. and internationally for over a decade. Raffo’s libretto for the opera FALLUJAH was part of the Kennedy Center’s International Theater Festival, received its world premiere at Long Beach Opera and opened at New York City Opera in 2016. A film of the opera aired on PBS accompanied by a documentary titled Fallujah: Art, Healing and PTSD.

 

2019 Cohort

 

LAMEECE ISSAQ

Lameece is an award-winning actor, writer, and producer. Her film Abe, co-written with Jacob Kader, directed by Fernando Grostein Andrade, and starring Stranger Things’ Noah Schnapp, premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. Ms. Issaq is the Founding Artistic Director of the NYC-based company Noor Theatre, dedicated to the work of artists of Middle Eastern descent, and for which she received the prestigious Obie award, alongside fellow co-founder Maha Chehlaoui. Her play Food and Fadwa (co-created with Jacob Kader) was a recipient of the Edgerton Foundation New American Play Award and premiered at New York Theatre Workshop. Ms. Issaq’s performance in the title role received overwhelmingly positive reviews, with Variety magazine praising it as “stunning.” The play went on to be translated into Arabic, presented in festivals in Abu Dhabi and Beirut, and published in two play anthologies. Other selected works include Noor and Hadi Go to Hogwarts (Theater Breaking Through Barriers); Nooha’s List, part of the compilation play Motherhood Outloud (Primary Stages); and the upcoming short film, Graveyardwww.lameeceissaq.com.

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Arian Moayed

Arian is the Co-Founder and Board Chair of Waterwell, a civic-minded and socially conscious theater and education company, as well as a Partner at the for-profit Waterwell Films. Most recently with Waterwell, Arian arranged the transcripts of a deportation proceeding called The Courtroom, directed by Waterwell’s Artistic Director Lee Sunday Evans. Other recent Waterwell productions include a dual-language Hamlet (played the title roll) and remounting a forgotten war musical called Blueprint Specials, produced on board of the Intrepid with a cast of veterans. At the Waterwell Drama Program, over 250 students a year learn world-class arts training and advocacy at the Professional Performing Arts School… free of charge. With Waterwell Films, he has written/directed the Emmy-nominated The Accidental Wolf, a streaming short form thriller starring Kelli O’Hara (theaccidentalwolf.com ). Notable acting credits: The Humans (Drama Desk Award), Guards at the Taj (Obie Award), Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo (Tony nom), Succession (HBO).

Mike Mosallam

Mike is a producer, director, writer for the theatre, film and television. Through his production company, Mike Mosallam Productions (www.watchmmp.com), he and his team produced short films: "Breaking Fast" (Cannes Film Festival), "Brothers" (Leeds Film Festival), and the upcoming "Ubuntu." He is currently in post-production on his feature film, "Breaking Fast" (based on the short), which is set for completion in late 2019. He is the creator and Co-Executive-Producer of the critically-acclaimed TLC series, "All-American Muslim." With a slate of projects in active development, the MMP team are excited to develop and produce works that tell the stories of marginalized groups. On the theatre side, Mike has produced and directed more than 100 theatrical productions from large-scale musicals, intimate cabaret settings, plays, concerts, and multi-media theatrical events. After eight years in New York / Los Angeles, Mike returned to Michigan in 2009 to head a new initiative, the Wayne County Film Office, and helped attract more than 70 titles to the metro Detroit area. Since January 2012, he has worked in production planning and development for Sunset Studios, Netflix, and IO, where he worked with shows such as “Scandal,” “How to Get Away with Murder," and HBO's "Looking" and "Togetherness."

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