Ismail Khalidi

Ismail Khalidi (إسماعيل خالدي; born 1982) is a Palestinian/Lebanese American playwright, screenwriter and theater director whose work tackles the history of Palestine and the modern Middle East, as well as wider themes of race, colonialism, displacement and war.

Khalidi was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1982 in the wake of the Israeli invasion but grew up primarily in Chicago, Illinois.

He is the son of Rashid Khalidi and Mona Khalidi and the grandson of Ismail Khalidi.

Khalidi received his B.A. from Macalester College in 2005 and his M.F.A. in Dramatic Writing from Tisch School of the Arts, New York University in 2009.

Khalidi's MFA thesis play is titled, "Final Status."

His first production (co-created with Bassam Jarbawi) Truth Serum Blues, debuted in 2005 at the Pangea World Theater in Minneapolis where he was also an actor and writer in residence.

Tennis in Nablus received two graduate student Kennedy Center Honors in 2008 while he was still at NYU, the Mark Twain Comedy Playwriting Award and the Quest for Peace Playwriting Award. Since then his plays have been produced and presented internationally and published in half a dozen anthologies.

He is best known for the plays Tennis in Nablus (2010) and Truth Serum Blues (2005) and the critically-acclaimed Returning to Haifa, which premiered in London in 2018.

His award-winning play Tennis in Nablus had its theatrical debut at the Alliance Theatre in 2010.

More recently, Khalidi co-adapted Ghassan Kanafani's Returning to Haifa for the stage with fellow playwright Naomi Wallace. His longstanding professional collaboration with Wallace ranges from theatre to essays and TV projects.

Khalidi has worked as an actor, dramaturg, playwright and director in the United States, Latin America and the Middle East.

He has received new play commissions from Pangea World Theater, The Public Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville, and Noor Theatre.

Among the plays included in the book is Khalidi's 2010 play, Tennis in Nablus. His play about the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Sabra Falling, was published in Double Exposure: Plays of the Jewish and Palestinian Diaspora (Playwrights Canada Press, 2016) and two monologues from his play were included, respectively, in Monologues for Actors of Color: Men; and Monologues for Actors of Color: Women, both edited by Roberta Uno and published by Routledge in 2016.

References:

Khalidi co-edited, along with Naomi Wallace, an anthology entitled Inside/Outside: Six Plays from Palestine and the Diaspora (Theatre Communications Group, 2015).

He directed the Spanish adaptation of his one-person play, Foot, for Teatro Amal in 2016 at the Parque Cultural de Valparaiso and was selected in 2020-21 to be a Directing Fellow at Minneapolis' Pangea World Theater.

Khalidi has published works of poetry in Mizna: Prose, Poetry, and Art Exploring Arab America, and has written for The Nation, Remezcla, American Theatre Magazine, Guernica , The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Nation, Times Union (Albany), The Daily Beast, and The Electronic Intifada, The Kenyon Review and Al Jazeera.