{"id":462,"date":"2022-07-23T11:22:41","date_gmt":"2022-07-23T15:22:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/artnow\/?page_id=462"},"modified":"2022-08-11T04:59:21","modified_gmt":"2022-08-11T08:59:21","slug":"betty-shamieh","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/artnow\/betty-shamieh\/","title":{"rendered":"Betty Shamieh"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Biography<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Betty Shamieh is a Palestinian-American playwright who explores the Arab experience through various lenses in her work. Throughout her career, she has authored fifteen plays that have had much success. Some of her works include Roar <\/em>(2004), which will be further analyzed in this page, The Black Eyed <\/em>(2007), Chocolate in Heat <\/em>(2001), Territories <\/em>(2008) <\/em>and Fit for a Queen <\/em>(2016). Roar <\/em>and The Black Eyed<\/em> both premiered off-Broadway: Roar <\/em>opened in the New Group Theatre in NYC and The Black Eyed<\/em> premiered at the New York Theatre Workshop. Her other plays have been produced at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco, the Theatre for the New City, Playhouse Theatre in Stockholm Sweden, and the Theater Fornos in Athens. Her plays have also been translated into seven languages. Shamieh received her B.A. from Harvard University and her M.F.A. in Playwriting from the Yale School of Drama. She has taught playwriting at Columbia University and Denison University, and currently is a professor at Marymount Manhattan College in NYC. Shamieh was named a Playwriting Fellow at Harvard University\u2019s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, is a two-time recipient of the NY Foundation for the Arts Playwriting Fellowship and received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Drama and Performance Art. She was named the UNESCO Young Artist for Intercultural Dialogue in 2011, is the winner of McKnight National Residency and Commission, Sundance Theatre Institute Residency, and received the NY Times Critics Pick four times with her play Roar<\/em>. Furthermore, she is the first Palestinian-American to have a play produced off-Broadway and her works are taught at universities throughout the U.S.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Career Highlight<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In July 2021, Shamieh was selected, along with three other writers, to be a part of Noor Theaters Artists Advancing Cultural Change Cohort. This program commissions artists to create their own work in response to contemporary American culture through a Middle Eastern lens. These pieces in the cohort typically reflect the artist’s own experiences, or address issues relevant to their cultures and communities. For Shamieh, this award is in line with what she does in a majority of her plays in the way that she strives to explore the Arab experience so that individuals have a better understanding and can learn from it. For her commission she will be writing a half hour television pilot titled Mecca of Comedy<\/em>. This series is inspired by her play Roar <\/em>in the way that it is about a \u201craunchy Arab female comic trying to move her career forward while living in the midst of the extremely conservative Arab American community of Detroit.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Roar<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n