Sahar Assaf

Sahar Assaf is an actress and stage director and an Assistant Professor of Theatre at the American University of Beirut. She recently co-established the AUB Theatre Initiative with playwright and English Professor Robert Myers under which she translated and directed Garcia-Lorca’s Blood Wedding as a site-specific promenade performance and co-translated, co-directed and starred in Shakespeare’s King Lear at Al Madina Theater in Beirut, the first production of Shakespeare in Lebanese colloquial. She also recently conceived and directed No Demand No Supply, a verbatim theatre about sex trafficking in Lebanon.

Her credits as a director include Ab: Beit Byout (an adaption of Tracy Letts’ August Osage County), Saadallah Wannous’ The Rape and Rituals of Signs and Transformations, Issam Mahfouz’s The Dictator, Watch Your Step, a site-specific performance about the Lebanese civil war and Ana Amel Ana Amela, a devised documentary theatre about the experience of janitors at AUB. Recent credits as an actress include Karen in Dinner With Friends by Donald Margulies directed by Carlos Chahine at Monnot Theatre, title role of Fo and Rame’s An Arab Woman Speaks produced by The Faction at New Diorama Theater in London and Barbara in Ab: Beit Byout at Babel Theater. As an actress, she is trained in Meisner technique and she recently started her training in Alba Emoting, a somatic approach to acting based in neuroscience. Sahar is a member of Lincoln Center Director’s Lab in NYC (2014) and of Director’s Lab North in Toronto (2017) and a Fulbright alumnus with an MA in Theatre Studies from Central Washington University (2011).