Raphaël Amahl Khouri

Raphaël Amahl Khouri is a Jordanian documentary playwright and theatremaker living between Berlin and Cairo. Khouri is the author of several plays, including the first transgender Arab play, She He Me (staged at Kosmos Theatre, Vienna 2019 and also performed online as part of NYC’s Criminal Queerness Festival 2020), and No Matter Where I Go, a play about the lives of queer women and non-binary Lebanese people staged in Beirut 2014.

His translation of Nawal Al Ali’s poetry recently won the Columbia Journal Print Contest. Khouri is part of the Climate Change Theater Action and his play Oh, How We Loved Our Tuna! was read internationally as part of that initiative. He was commissioned to write new work for Outburst Queer Arts Festival in Belfast, featuring there in 2019 and 2020. Khouri was a selected playwright at the Arcola Global Queer Plays (London 2018) and the Lark hotINK international play reading series (NYC, 2015), and a member of the Lincoln Center Director’s Lab (NYC, 2013). His work has been published in several US journals, as well as in the Methuen Anthology of Trans plays (2021), the International Queer Drama Anthology (Neofelis Verlag, 2020), Global Queer Plays (Oberon Books 2018), Skrivena Ljubav (Samizdat 2018), and International Perspectives on Where Performance Leads Queer anthology (Palgrave, 2016).

Photo by Nancy Mounir.