DGI INSTRUCTOR

RHIANA YAZZIE

Their DGI Teaching History includes Architecture of Plays: American Indian and First Nations Writers.

RHIANA YAZZIE is a Navajo playwright but is also an all-around theatre maker (producer, director, actor) and filmmaker based in Minnesota. She is a 2020 Steinberg Playwright Award winner, a 2018/19 Bush Leadership Fellow, a 2017 Sally Award Winner for Vision, a 2016/2017 Playwrights’ Center McKnight Fellow, a two-time Playwrights’ Center Jerome Fellow (2010/2011 and 2006/2007) and was a Playwrights’ Center Core Member for three years.  She has just finished her new play, QUEEN CLEOPATRE AND PRINCESS POCAHONTAS for a joint commission from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the Public Theater for American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle. She has recently finished a new play, Nancy, about Nancy Reagan and her intersection with Indian Country in the 80s, astrology, and her little-known- about Native heritage. It will be workshopped at The Playwrights’ Center in April, 2021 through their Ruth Easton Series.  Rhiana is a graduate of the Masters of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California, where she had the pleasure to produce events for the student body which included lectures and concerts by Madeleine Albright, Herbie Hancock, Spalding Grey, Paula Vogel, and Stephen Hawking.  She was a playwright in residence at the William Inge Center in Independence, Kansas, and has been in residence at the MacDowell Colony, at the biennial Bonderman National Theatre for Youth Symposium, and The Kennedy Center’s New Visions/New Voices.