Marjan Moosavi

Marjan Moosavi’s academic journey has taken her from Tehran to Toronto, then to the University of Maryland, and now to Pittsburgh, a geographical trajectory that has also shaped her investment in theatre across languages, borders, and systems of knowledge.

A theatre and performance studies scholar, dramaturg, editor, and educator, Moosavi specializes in decoloniality, dramaturgy, global and diasporic theatre, MENA/SWANA theatre, and theatre historiography. Her scholarship examines how theatre creates alternative social and ethical worlds under conditions of political, religious, and institutional constraint, with particular attention to gender, war and disability, censorship, spatiality, and theatrical form. She is equally invested in digital humanities and computational approaches to drama and has contributed to developing digital research and pedagogical initiatives around SWANA theatre and performance. She has curated two pioneering and transnational digital projects: Digital Guide to Theater of the Middle East and the Digital Photo Exhibit on the Middle Eastern Theatre.

Moosavi’s research has been supported by fellowships and grants, including those from ASTR, Fulbright, the Mellon Foundation at Harvard, and Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Her articles have appeared in scholarly journals and edited collections, including 50 Key Performance Artists, Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, Asian Theatre Journal, TDR, Theatre Topics, and New Theatre Quarterly. Moosavi is the co-editor of the forthcoming two-volume anthology Decolonization and Dramaturgy in Global Theatre and Performance (Bloomsbury in 2027), and is working on her manuscript, Contemporary Iranian Theatre and the Aesthetics of Worlding Otherwise (1990-2020). In addition to her academic writing, Moosavi collaborates as a research dramaturg and cultural consultant with theatre companies across the U.S. and Canada and has collaborated on productions, staged readings, translations, and intercultural performance projects.

She teaches in the BA, MFA, and PhD programs and mentors student dramaturgs. She is affiliate faculty with the Gender, Sexuality, and Women Studies Program and Cultural Studies. Graduate mentorship is central to her academic practice. Most recently, she has served in ATDS Journal Article Works-in-Progress Mentoring programs and ASTR and ATHE graduate mentorship programs. She is particularly interested in supporting emerging scholars and artist-scholars working across disciplinary, linguistic, and geographical boundaries and in creating pathways between scholarly research and theatrical practice.

Moosavi serves on the MENATMA Educators Circle Committee and as Vice President for Grants and Awards at the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA). Her editorial work includes serving as a Regional Managing Editor for The Theatre Times and as one of the performance review editors with Arab Stages. Across these roles, she works to expand the visibility and circulation of MENA/SWANA theatre, artists, and scholarship and to build stronger connections among artists, scholars, students, and communities.