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 theatrical staging and performance texts, Borna transports audiences to magical realms with their own sense of logic. These nonlinear, radical landscapes explore the pluralities of immigrant and queer experiences through death, desire, and psychic traumas against dreamlike, larger-than-life backdrops. Writing about communities he is part of, Borna eschews didactic naturalism for madcap surrealist montages. These theatrical worlds escape the shadows of hegemony, allowing these communities to be messy, complicated, and deeply human. Borna’s work possess an otherworldly quality, theatrical necessity, and profound revelation, exploring the edges of theater’s limits with both admiration and irreverence.