Our Moderators

Sahar Assaf

Sahar Assaf is the Artistic Director of Golden Thread Productions in San Francisco, the first U.S. theatre company dedicated to the Middle East. Her artistic practice centers on socially and politically engaged theatre, with a strong connection to Middle Eastern stories and voices. Most recently, she directed Drowning in Cairo by Adam Ashraf Elsayigh at Golden Thread and The Tutor by Torange Yeghiazarian at New Conservatory Theatre Center in San Francisco. She has curated and produced three seasons of programming (now in her fourth) at Golden Thread, featuring new plays, classical texts, and devised performances. A major milestone under her leadership was the 2024 “Season for Palestine,” which achieved record-breaking attendance and deep community engagement. She also co-produced 24 Hours for Palestine: A Moon Will Rise from Darkness, a global online event that brought together over 100 artists and activists in solidarity with Palestine. Prior to joining Golden Thread, she taught theatre at the American University of Beirut from 2012 to 2020, where she co-founded and co-led the Theatre Initiative alongside Robert Myers. During that time, she directed works by García Lorca, Shakespeare, Saadallah Wannous, Issam Mahfouz, and others, in addition to devising documentary and site-specific performances around social issues. She is a Fulbright award recipient, a member of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab (New York) and Directors Lab North (Toronto), and a co-founder of the Directors Lab Mediterranean. She has presented her work internationally, and contributed academic writings on performance and theatre practice.

Edward Ziter

Edward Ziter is a theatre historian with particular interest in the intersections between European and Arab performance traditions. His most recent book, Political Performance in Syria: From the Six-Day War to the Syrian Uprising (2014), was co-winner of the Joe A. Calloway Prize for the Best Book on Drama or Theater. Other publications include The Orient on the Victorian Stage (2003) as well as articles on Shakespearean actors and comic actors of the Romantic and Victorian periods and on contemporary theatre and film in the Arab World. He served as Middle Eastern area editor for the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Stage Actors and Acting (2015). He is Affiliate Faculty in the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, the Department of English, the Department of Performance Studies, and the Theater Program at NYU Abu Dhabi. His current research focuses on nationalist performance during the Arab Renaissance (the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries), focusing on Arabizations of Romantic dramas and Shakespeare.

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