director, playwright, & producer

Borna Barzin is a playwright, director, and producer based in Brooklyn, New York. He was the Asian American Arts Alliance’s 2024 Van Lier Fellow in Theater and recently completed a MacDowell Fellowship, where he wrote his latest play, Belly Dancing Lessons—a story about a group of young people who form an illicit underground belly dancing studio in 1980s Iran. Recent directing credits include Blood Wedding by Federico García Lorca and Summertime by Charles Mee (Atlantic Stage 2); Black Ice by Max Wolf Friedlich; When We Write With Ashes (Lincoln Center, National Queer Theater); Pinching Pennies with Penny Marshall (New York Theatre Workshop); and How I Learned to Drive (Sibiu International Theatre Festival, Romania). He has created new work at theaters such as Atlantic Theater Company, New York Theater Workshop, The Bushwick Starr, and Colt Couer. He is currently developing a new play, The Tunnel of Love, with Obie Award–winning playwright Charles Mee.

Through staging and writing performance texts, Borna’s work follows its own sense of logic, embracing the limitlessness of theater. Against dreamlike, larger-than-life backdrops, Borna explores the pluralities of immigrant and queer experiences because their voices live closest to the volcano’s mouth — their passion and depth is the force that fuels his imaginative space. His work lives in the lineage of Lorca and Nilo Cruz: melding the familiar with the spectacular, realism with the otherworldly, and classicism with modernity. It speak to a mystical power that cuts deep to the core and demands emotional response from its audience. Eschewing didactic naturalism for madcap surrealist montages, Borna’s work escapes the shadows of hegemony by allowing these communities to be their  messiest, most complicated, and most human. This commitment to culturally specific storytelling expands who theater is for, reaching beyond majoritarian aesthetics and inviting nontraditional audiences.