director, playwright, & producer

Borna Barzin is a director, writer, and producer based in Brooklyn, New York, and The Asian American Arts Alliance’s 2024 Van Lier Fellow in Theater. He recently served as a Guest Artist at NYU Tisch where he directed Lorca’s Blood Wedding and Charles Mee’s Summertime at Atlantic Stage 2. Other directing credits include Max Wolf Friedlich’s Black Ice, When We Write With Ashes (Lincoln Center/National Queer Theater), Pinching Pennies with Penny Marshall (New York Theatre Workshop), and  How I Learned to Drive (Sibiu International Theatre Festival in Sibiu, Romania). He has completed residencies at institutions such as Roundabout Theater Company, Colt Coeur, and The Mercury Store. His plays HELL IS and Like This were workshopped as a part of Egg & Spoon Theater’s Incubate NYC Program and his Van Lier Fellowship, respectively. Borna is currently developing a new play, The Tunnel of Love, with Obie-Winning playwright Charles Mee.

Through theatrical staging and performance texts, Borna transports audiences to magical realms with their own sense of logic. These nonlinear, radical landscapes explore the pluralities of immigrant and queer experiences through death, desire, and psychic traumas against dreamlike, larger-than-life backdrops. Writing about communities he is part of, Borna eschews didactic naturalism for madcap surrealist montages. These theatrical worlds escape the shadows of hegemony, allowing these communities to be messy, complicated, and deeply human. Borna’s work possess an otherworldly quality, theatrical necessity, and profound revelation, exploring the edges of theater’s limits with both admiration and irreverence.