Noor Theatre Announces Third Artists Advancing Cultural Change Cohort

Writers Jacob Kader (Abe, Food and Fadwa), Haleh Roshan (Bellwether, FREE FREE FREE FREE) and Betty Shamieh (The Black Eyed, Roar), and Hadi Tabbal (The Remnants, Icarus in Berytus) will comprise Noor Theatre's third Artists Advancing Cultural Change Cohort.

As part of this program, each artist is commissioned to create work in the medium of their choice that reflects and responds to key ideas and narratives swirling at the center of contemporary American culture through their own specific Middle Eastern lenses. Our commissioned pieces illustrate the breadth and richness of our many diasporic communities, challenge the harmful stereotypes of Middle Easterners rampant in popular media, and advance important conversations within our communities. The MENA diaspora is not monolithic, and our pieces reflect the unique voices and perspectives of our artists. Noor is thrilled to continue this program to drive cultural and narrative change in the United States, and to create a pipeline whereby our community's work is shared with mass audiences.

Jacob Kader 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 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.

Betty Shamieh 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 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.

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