Naghmeh Samini

Naghmeh Samini (PhD), playwright, scriptwriter and lecturer in Dramatic Arts, was born in Iran and received her BA in Drama and MA in Cinema from the University of Tehran. She did her PhD in Art Studies at the University of Tarbiat Modarres in Tehran with a thesis focused on Drama and Mythology.

More than twenty of her plays have been staged in Iran, France, India, Canada, the United States and other countries. These include Sleeping in an Empty Cup, Sky Horses Rain Ashes, Making Faces and The Home. Her screenplays, including Main Line and Heiran and 3 women won awards. In 2007 critics selected her as one of the five top playwrights in Iran. Her plays are experimental in structure and handle a variety of topical subjects at personal and sociopolitical levels. Inspired by One Thousand and One Night, she uses magic realism and non-linear narratives in her plays. One of her recent plays entitled The King and the Mathematician: A Legend(2012) was selected by UNESCO as one of the cultural achievements of the year.

Naghmeh has been Assistant Professor/Lecturer in Dramatic Literature at the Faculty of Music and Performing Arts, University of Tehran, since 2005. She was also affiliated with the School of Drama, University of Washington between 2012 and 2017. She has run several creative writing and drama workshops in Iran and abroad. As a researcher, she has several publications among which the most important ones are two books: one about One Thousand and One night entitled The Book of Love and Magic (Tehran: Markaz, 2000) and the other which is focused on reflections of Iranian Mythology in Iranian drama is entitled The Theatre of Myths (Tehran: Ney, 2008). The latter book won the awards of ‘the best book of the year’ in Iran in 2010. She has recently submitted her manuscript for a monograph entitled Battles and Bodies (Tehran: Ney, forthcoming 2019) on the semiotics of human body in post-war Japanese cinema.

She has published numerous articles and delivered lectures on cinema, theatre and cultural studies in Persian and English. Her most recent lecture delivered in Stanford University was entitled ‘Feminine body and Feminine Mind in Iranian Cinema. Naghmeh has won several scholarships and bursaries for her creative writing and research projects from Japan Foundation, Aschberg UNESCO and other cultural organisations.