ANDREA ASSAF
ARTISTIC & EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
Andrea Assaf is an award-winning Lebanese American playwright, poet, theatre director, performer, educator and cultural organizer.
She is the founding Artistic & Executive Director of Art2Action, Inc. With over 25 years of experience as a professional theatre maker, Andrea’s work has been featured at acclaimed venues across the U.S., and internationally.
Her seminal multidisciplinary work, Eleven Reflections on September, was originally commissioned and premiered by Pangea World Theater, for the 2011 Alternate Visions Festival. It toured from 2011-16 to: The Carpetbag Theatre, Straz Center for the Performing Arts in conjunction with the National Performance Network (NPN) conference, Arab American National Museum Global Fridays series, Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) as part of the 5th National Asian American Theatre Festival (produced by CAATA), The Apollo Sound Stage as part of the Women of the World (WOW) Festival, The Kennedy Center Millenium Stage as part of the inaugural Women’s Voices Theatre Festival, and had its New York premiere at La MaMa ETC, in partnership with Hi-ARTS. It also toured internationally to Centro Cultural Tijuana (CECUT) in Mexico, and the Grotowski Institute in Poland. During the pandemic, Eleven Reflections on September was re-created as a digital film, commissioned by the Carver Community Cultural Center, garnering 20 Official Selections at international film festivals, with awards and recognitions including: Best Experimental Feature, Silk Road Film Awards Cannes (2021); Best Social Justice Film, NY International Film Festival (2022); and more. Art2Action then produced three iterations of city-specific, community co-created works in a series titled Eleven Reflections on the Nation, including: 11Reflections: San Antonio commissioned by the Carver Community Cultural Center (2021); 11Reflections: San Francisco, co-produced by Golden Thread Productions and BRAVA for Women in the Arts (2024); and 11Reflections: NYC at HERE Arts Center, commemorating the 25th anniversary of the tragedy of 9/11 and the wars that followed.
Andrea’s award-winning play DRONE received a workshop production at the Detroit Public Theatre (DPT) presented by the Arab American National Museum, with support from the Joyce Award, in 2025; and a staged reading at the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) New Orleans in 2023. The touring concert, DRONE: Testimonies & Music, has been featured at the Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival (D-CAF) Cairo in 2025, Surviving the Long Wars Veteran Arts Triennial at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2023, the Arab American National Museum A+R Convening in conjunction with MENATMA’s Fall Convening in 2022, and more. DRONE was originally commissioned by the Arab American National Museum, CAC New Orleans, Art2Action, and the National Performance Network (NPN).
Other original plays include: Outside the Circle (co-written with Samuel Valdez, directed by Dora Arreola), commissioned and presented by the Esperanza Peace & Justice Center, Jumpstart Productions, NPN, and Pangea World Theater, where it premiered and was re-mounted for the Morphologies Queer Performance Festival (2012); Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders with Mujeres en Ritual Danza-Teatro (2005), which toured internationally in the U.S., Mexico, Nicaragua, and Canada; and Globalicities, Andrea’s first solo show, which premiered at the New York International Fringe Festival (2003).
Additional directing and dramaturgy credits include: The Seasoned Woman by Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson with Lubana Al Quntar, Carver Community Cultural Center (2024); Music Direction for Tomorrow Will Be Sunday by Heather Raffo at The Kennedy Center Family Theatre as part of the RiverRun Festival (2023); Speed Killed My Cousin by Linda Parris-Bailey, produced by The Carpetbag Theater (national tour 2014-19); 9 Parts of Desire by Heather Raffo (University of South Florida, 2015); breaking letter(s) by Suhier Hammad as part of the New WORLD Theater (NWT) Intersection conference (2008); Parang Sabil: Ballad of the Kris by Kinding Sindaw at the Beckett Theatre as part of the inaugural National Asian American Theatre Festival (2007); and more.
Read Andrea’s full CV here.
Awards & Recognitions
Awards & Recognitions include: 2026-27 Playwright’s Center McKnight National Residency & Commission for Sokwe: Look Human; 2025 Creative Impact Award (United States Artists) for DRONE; 2025 Venturous Playwright Finalist for DRONE; 2024 Joyce Award, in partnership with the Arab American National Museum; 2021 Best Experimental Feature, Silk Road Film Awards Cannes for Eleven Reflections on September; 2020 Pushcart Prize Nomination for Transcriptions; 2019 NEFA National Theatre Project for DRONE; 2019 & 2014 Doris Duke Building Bridges grants; 2019 & 2011 National Performance Network (NPN) Creation Fund commissions for DRONE and Outside the Circle; 2017 Finalist for the Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism (Split This Rock Poetry Festival); 2010 Princess Grace/Gant Gaither Theatre Award (Directing); 2007 Hedgebrook Residency for "women authoring change;" 2004 Contacto Cultural (U.S.-Mexico Foundation for Culture) as artist-in-residence with Mujeres en Ritual Danza-Teatro; 2002 Urbana Queer Slam winner, Urbana Collective/Bowery Poetry Club; 2001 Best Play Award, CounterClockwise: NYU Arts in Action Playwrighting Contest for Globalicities; and more.
Andrea is considered a thought-leader in the national arts field, who has impacted the development of several national networks. She was a founding Board member of the Consortium of Asian American Theatres & Artists (CAATA), and is currently a founding Board member of the Middle Eastern/North African Theatre-Makers Alliance (MENATMA). Andrea is also a founding Co-Director of the National Institute for Directing & Ensemble Creation (co-organized by Art2Action and Pangea World Theater). Andrea has been an Artist-in-Residence at the University of South Florida (USF) School of Theatre and Dance (2014-18 and 2020-21) where she taught, directed, and co-created a General Education course on Community-based Arts Practice with Dora Arreola. She has also been a Trainer with Equity Quotient (EQ), an UpROOTing Oppressions Facilitator for Alternate ROOTS, and a Master Teacher for YoungArts (Writing/Performance, 2018-20). Andrea formerly served on the conference Steering Committee of Women Playwrights International (WPI, 2012-15 South Africa conference), and has been a member of RAWI, the Radius of Arab American Writers. Former leadership positions include Artistic Director of New WORLD Theater (University of Massachusetts, 2004-09), and Program Associate for Animating Democracy (2001-04). Andrea currently serves on the Executive Committee of Alternate ROOTS.
Andrea has also developed a specialization in community-based arts and socially engaged work, with a focus on trauma-informed practices. Throughout her career, she has devised and directed numerous community co-created works with veterans, refugees, and youth, including: youth theatre productions for the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI)/Roots & Shoots in Kigoma, Tanzania, AmeriCorps in Harlem/NYC, The Bauen Camp in Wyoming, New WORLD Theater’s Project 2050 at the University of Massachusetts, YoungArts (Miami, New York, and Los Angeles), and more. Multi-year community-based projects with survivors of war include: Sheekadi Walaalo / Sister Story by the Walaalo! Somali Women’s Collective (New WORLD Theater, 2005-08); Chrysalis: Veterans, Breaking-through, and the Process of Becoming more Human, created through a partnership with the PRRC recovery program of the VA, presented at the University of South Florida (USF) and Tampa University (2017-18); and more. Andrea is a co-founder of the Creative Regeneration Retreat, an intensive process for women survivors of war to regain creative voice, inaugurated at the Hammana Artist House, Lebanon, in 2026.
Andrea’s poetry has been published internationally, including: Transcriptions, Sinister Wisdom (Vol 113): Radical Muses, 2019; Soy Mujer Cuando…, Building Womanist Coalitions (ed. G. Lemons), University of Illinois Press, 2019; Traveling (re-print), Pacifica: Poetry International: Contemporary Tunisian Poetry (eds. K. Hamdy and L. Rice), 2015; Portrait of a Daf Player, Autumn Stream in Northern Climate, and Dreaming, Mizna: Prose, Poetry and Art Exploring Arab America, 2013; this woman, this sea in Scarf Magazine (London), 2013; Steps to Leaving, Hedgebrook News (Issue 23), Winter 2007; Globalicities (excerpts from the play), Up From the ROOTS, Alternate ROOTS 2003; Play, Down, and The Cheetah (Spanish translations by Laura Jáuregui), Alforia XXVI: Revista de Poesía, Mexico, 2003; and more. Other publications include articles and book chapters for the national arts field, such as: The Fire in the Center: Directors on Directing & Ensemble Creation (co-editor and contributor, forthcoming from Routledge); “Co-Creating Democracy: Aesthetics in Action,” chapter in Democracy as Creative Practice: Weaving a Fabric of Community Life (eds. Tom Borrup and Andrew Zitcer, New Village Press, 2024); Civic Dialogue, Arts & Culture: Findings from Animating Democracy (co-authored with P. Korza and B. Schaffer Bacon); plus with numerous articles by Animating Democracy, including "Inroads: The Intersection of Art & Civic Dialogue" and other writings included case study compendiums published by Americans for the Arts. As a poet, Andrea has been featured at Split This Rock Poetry Festival, Bowery Poetry Club, Hedgebrook, Barnes & Noble, The People’s Poetry Gathering NYC (2003), Bluestockings Women’s Bookstore, and more.
Andrea has a Master’s degree in Performance Studies from New York University (NYU), Tisch School of the Arts, where she studied with Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Fred Moten, Augusto Boal, Holly Hughes, Richard Schechner, and more. She also has a BFA in Acting from NYU/Tisch, where she trained at Circle in the Square and the Experimental Theatre Wing (ETW), with a special focus and teacher training in Meisner Technique. Andrea was an Apprentice at the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange (2001). She also spent a semester abroad in Tanzania with the School for International Training (SIT, 1991), and six months as a volunteer for the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI), where she created her first devised play with Kigoma Secondary School students on conservation education.