director, playwright, & producer

Borna Barzin is a Brooklyn-based playwright and director whose work moves between downtown performance and major New York institutions. Borna was recently named the inaugural Theater Resident of the Queer Nightlife Community Center, where his play "The Perverse" will premiere this fall. A 2024 Van Lier Fellow in Theater with the Asian American Arts Alliance and a recent MacDowell Fellow, he has presented work at Lincoln Center, New York Theatre Workshop, Sibiu International Theatre Festival, Atlantic Theater Company, The Bushwick Starr, and National Queer Theater, among others. He is currently developing a new play with Obie-Winner Charles Mee, and will join the Playwrights Program at The Juilliard School in Fall 2026.

Through staging and writing performance texts, Borna’s work follows its own sense of logic, embracing the limitlessness of theater. Against dreamlike, larger-than-life backdrops, Borna explores the pluralities of immigrant and queer experiences because their voices live closest to the volcano’s mouth — their passion and depth is the force that fuels his imaginative space. His work melds the familiar with the spectacular, realism with the otherworldly, and classicism with modernity. It speaks to a mystical power that cuts deep to the core and demands emotional response from its audience. Eschewing didactic naturalism for madcap surrealist montages, Borna’s work escapes the shadows of hegemony by allowing these communities to be their  messiest, most complicated, and most human. This commitment to culturally specific storytelling expands who theater is for, reaching beyond majoritarian aesthetics and inviting nontraditional audiences.

Borna is represented by Luke Virkstis at William Morris Endeavor (WME): LVirkstis@wmeagency.com 

direct contact: bornabbarzin@gmail.com