Bio

Heather Raffo is a singular and outstanding voice in the American theater whose work has been championed by the New Yorker as “an example of how art can remake the world.” Having helped forge a new genre of Arab American theater, she’s spent her career writing and embodying stories of Iraq: from the lives and dreams of Iraqi women in her seminal work 9 Parts of Desire (2003, PBS Film 2023), to the suicidal ideation of an Iraq war veteran in the opera Fallujah (2012, PBS Film 2016), and the restless longings of an Iraqi refugee architect in Noura (2018). A multi-award-winning writer and actor, she’s toured nationally and internationally performing in places as diverse as the Kennedy Center, Aspen Ideas Festival, London’s House of Commons, and the US Islamic World Forum. Her plays have premiered Off Broadway, Off West End, and on countless mainstages throughout the country and the world. An anthology of her work, Heather Raffo’s Iraq Plays: The Things That Can’t Be Said (Bloomsbury, 2021), brings together two decades of her groundbreaking contributions to the American theater and speaks to the bravery required to be at the forefront of a movement.  

As a Social Practice resident at The Kennedy Center, Raffo’s current focus experiments across genres and seeks to bridge the diverse audiences she’s built over decades.  For the 20^th anniversary of the Iraq War, she released a new film, NINE PARTS which will air nationally on PBS (April 2025).  An adaptation of her historic play now told from the vantage point of 20 years after the war, the film newly centers her Arab-American experience and offers a first-of-its- kind bridge between her Michigan and Middle Eastern roots.  Similarly, her latest theatrical experiment, The Migration Play Cycle: A New Theatrical Platform, seeks to center audiences locally, while connecting them globally.  Awarded Creative Capital, APAP, and NPN grants, this vast multi-locational work, follows migration through the global economy by creating bespoke scenes for new locales.  An ambitious global co-production, combining live theater with an immersive virtual world, it aims to be the first ever evolving theater platform, allowing audiences to follow the play over time and place, much like migration itself. 

Raised in the Midwest and the daughter of an Iraqi immigrant, Raffo continues to commit her artistic practice to working across all kinds of borders: on mainstages and in rural communities; with the military and in the Middle East; in swing states and in refugee facilities – as she helps forge cultural and national conversations around the most pressing issues of our times. Raffo recently joined Artists For Understanding, a new initiative between the White House and the NEA bringing essential culture creators together to foster change. She is a proud member of the socially transformative Epic Theatre Ensemble’s Artistic Advisory Council, Playwrights Horizon’s Advisory Council, a board member of Noor Theater and The Playwrights Center, and she has cultivated a decade-long collaboration with Georgetown’s LAB for Global Performance and Politics and The Arab American National Museum. A passionate educator, she’s taught at dozens of universities, led campus-wide cohorts, and continues to work across generations and cultures with her narrative initiative, Places of Pilgrimage, offering participants an opportunity to imagine their own stories as valued voices on stage and helping communities develop a public voice.