Daaimah Mubashshir is a playwright and theatre-maker living and working in New York. They are on faculty at Bard College and have been a guest speaker at Yale School of Drama, Williams College, Skidmore College, and Kennesaw State University. They are the artistic director of {EDAP} which produces moving image work, text, and performance to give audiences a kinetic experience of Black bodies freeing themselves from the bondage of their past.
Their work has been commissioned and developed by New Georges, Clubbed Thumb, Soho Rep, WP Theater, Playco, and Fire This Time Festival, among others. Selected stage plays include Night of Power, Room Enough, The Chronicles of Cardigan and Khente, and Emily Black is A Total Gift.
Their awards include a 2020-2022 WP Theater Lab Fellowship, 2019-2022 Core Writer Fellowship a Playwrights Center, MN, a 2018 Audrey Residency at New Georges, two MacDowell Fellowships, a Catwalk Institute residency, and a Foundation of Contemporary Arts Emergency grant.
Published works include Molasses and A Blue Coat (Kenyon Review Online), The Zero Loop (No Tokens Journal), Come with Me - Solve for X in The Occasional 2, edited by Will Arbery (53rd State Press), and The Immeasurable Want of Light (3 Hole Press).
Mubashshir has been awarded a Helen Mirrell Playwriting Award for The Immeasurable Want of Light, which is partially set at an artist residency in NH and was written while at MacDowell in 2017. They also completed a draft of Not In This Room, a full length play about accepting queerness within a African-American Muslim family, during that residency.
While at MacDowell in 2023, they worked on a new play about Alexander Gilson, a Black horticulturist who endured, mastered, and transcended his station.
Portrait by Maya Sharpe
