Artists & Projects Directory
Leila Buck
Leila Buck is an Arab American playwright, actress, storyteller and teaching artist. Her award-winning solo show, ISite, about growing up between the U.S. and the Arab world, has toured the U.S., Europe and China and will be published in Aswat: An anthology of Arab-American Drama, forthcoming in 2012. Her second play, In the Crossing, about her experience in Lebanon with her Jewish husband during the Israeli-Hezbollah war of 2006, and the challenges of telling that story, was first performed in the Public Theater's New Work Now! Festival 2006 (Director Jo Bonney), and has since been developed with the support of the Brooklyn Museum, Epic Theatre Center, the Public Theater and New York Theatre Workshop, and the Lark Play Development Center, where it was a finalist for Playwrights' Week 2009. In the Crossing received a mini-run in the Women Center Stage festival 2011 and will be presented by the Culture Project in New York in fall 2012.
In November 2008 she performed her monologue One, about an Arab-American canvassing for Obama, for Epic's First Vote event, alongside work by renowned writers and performers including Neil LaBute, Craig Lucas, Kathleen Chalfant, David Strathairn, Nilajah Sun and Tony Kushner. Her most recent work in development, Hkeelee, begun in 2008 during the inaugural season of the Public Theater's Emerging Writers Group, received a Special Jury Prize from the Middle East America grant co-sponsored by Silk Road (Chicago), the Lark (New York), and Golden Thread Productions (San Francisco). Hkeelee also received The America Project Commission, to support work that engages diverse citizens in an exploration of an important civic issue, and incorporates their voices into the creation of an artistic work.
As an actress Buck has worked with writers and directors including Kia Corthron, Annie Dorsen, Yussef el Guindi, Thomas Kail (In the Heights), Isis Misdary, Naomi Wallace and Blanka Zizka. She is currently touring internationally as an actress in Aftermath, based on interviews with Iraqi refugees, by Erik Jensen and Jessica Blank.
Over the past ten years Buck has been a founding member and Education Director of Nibras Arab-American Theater Collective, Artistic Director of Nisaa Arab-American Women's Collective, and a writer and performer for the New York Arab-American Comedy Festival. She co-created and edited Nibras' debut play, Sajjil (Record), which won Best Ensemble Performance at the NY Fringe Festival 2002, and served as head producer with Nibras and New York Theatre Workshop of ASWAT: Voices of Palestine, a series of readings of plays from and about Palestine, as well as numerous workshops, readings, and presentations by Nibras from 2001-2007.
Buck has conducted workshops on playwriting, storytelling and drama for cross-cultural engagement at conferences, universities, schools and cultural centers across the U.S. and around the world, most recently in Denmark as a U.S. State Department Cultural Envoy. Her prose, poetry and critical essays have appeared in American Theatre and Mizna magazine, and her theatrical work has been featured in The New York Times and Lebanon's Daily Star. Her essay on Arab-American political theater can be found in Etching Our Own Image: Voices from the Arab American Art Movement, from Cambridge Scholars Press.