Heather Raffo

Heather Raffo is a singular and outstanding voice in the American theatre 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 theatre, 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) (Lortel award, Blackburn, Outer Critics Circle, Helen Hayes nominations), 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) (Helen Hayes and Weissberger awards).

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 (2021), brings together two decades of her most groundbreaking contributions to the American theatre and speaks to the bravery required to be at the forefront of a movement.

Raffo’s most current work seeks to expand across genres: In March 2023, a film of 9 Parts of Desire is set to be released on PBS to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War, and her latest, The Migration Play Cycle: A New Theatrical Platform, her most ambitious theatrical imagining in scale and scope, situates themes around migration and the global economy and aims to be the first ever-evolving, multi-locational theatrical platform (Creative Capital, McKnight, NPN and APAP Arts Forward Awards).

Being raised in the Midwest and the daughter of an Iraqi immigrant, Raffo has committed her artistic practice to working across all kinds of borders: on mainstages and in rural communities; with the military and in the Middle East; in swing states and in refugee facilities, as she helps to shape cultural and national conversations in the decades since 9/11.