Get to Know Me.

Suzi Elnaggar is an Egyptian American performance scholar, freelance dramaturg, and theatre maker. She is a multimodal artist who writes and performs work that investigates her relationship to culture, community, and self. She is the Producing Artistic Director of Backstitch Story Project and the Founder and Artistic Director of the Digital Development Project. Before entering the theatre and performance field, Suzi was a high school educator, community organizer, and nonprofit professional. She has over 10 years of experience in non-profit and community work, including development and communications for the Waco Immigrants Alliance and as program director at Mission Waco, where she directed the Youth Afterschool and Summer Program and collaborated with other programs, such as Jubilee Theatre Waco. Suzi has run For Hope Design Co., a sustainable textile and bag business, since its inception in 2020, when she raised over $10,000 for local organizations through the sale of masks.

Suzi was a 2021 Kennedy Center Dramaturgy Intensive Fellow and works as both a developmental and production dramaturg. She has two Bachelor's degrees, a BE in Secondary Education and a BA in Classics/Great Texts, an MA in Theatre Studies from Baylor University, and is a Ph.D. Candidate at Northwestern University in Interdisciplinary Theatre & Drama and Middle Eastern and North African Studies with a focus on feminist, liberatory, and protest performance in contemporary Egypt. Her work has been published in Asian Theatre Journal, Arab Stages, Review: The Journal of Dramaturgy, Theatre Times, and Theatre (Yale, upcoming issue). Her scholarly interests include recontextualizing Greek tragedy, myths, and folklore; postcolonial theatre contexts; decoloniality in performance; theatre of social change; the intersection of trauma and performance; transnational and migrant stories; and work that centers SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) experiences, especially those relating to Egypt and the Levant. As a dramaturg, Suzi is experienced in both production and developmental work. She has read scripts for PlayPenn, Playwright’s Center, Rattlestick’s Van Lier New Voices Fellowship, SHE-LA, and Sparkfest, among many others. She produces Playshare Evolution play lab and The Match playwright-dramaturg through the Digital Development Project.