Heather Raffo
Author, Actor and Educator
Heather Raffo is an author, actor and educator 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, PBS Film 2023), to the suicidal ideation of an Iraq war veteran in the opera Fallujah (2012, PBS Film 2016), 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 plays have been performed on countless mainstages throughout the world. An anthology of her work (2021), Heather Raffo’s Iraq Plays: The Things That Can’t Be Said, brings together two decades of her theatrical contributions to changing national identities for both Iraqis and Americans in the decades after 9/11.
Raffo’s current work continues to focus on bridging cultural divides: she recently joined Artists For Understanding, a new joint initiative between the White House and the NEA bringing essential MENA and Jewish voices together to foster changemaking, and her ambitious new Migration Play Cycle: A New Theatrical Platform centers themes of migration and the global economy and aims to be the first ever-evolving, multi-locational play, combining live theater with an immersive virtual world, allowing audiences to follow the play over time and place, much like migration itself. Raised in the Midwest and the daughter of an Iraqi immigrant, Raffo continues to commit 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 forge cultural and international conversations around the most pressing issues of our times.