Khawla Ibraheem is a playwright, actor , and director based in Majdal Shams, in the occupied Golan Heights. She is a regular at many theatres in Palestine, including El Hakawati (the Palestinian National Theatre in Jerusalem), The Freedom Theatre in Jenin, and Al Jawal Theatre in Sakhnin. Ibraheem's recent project, London Jenin, was a collaboration with The Freedom Theatre for which she won Best Director and Best Script at the Palestinian National Theatre Festival.
Outside of Palestine, she has collaborated with many theatres and institutions, including as a fellow at Macdowell and as an artist-in-residence at the Sundance Theatre Lab, where she met longtime collaborator, director Oliver Butler. Ibraheem was also commissioned by Columbia University's Center for Palestine Studies as part of a series of new radio plays written by Palestinian playwrights.
During her residency at MacDowell, she worked on rewriting the play Metro Gaza into Arabic. It is a play co-written with Herve Liochemol based on an art project of the artist Mohamad Abu Sal. The play will be opening at the Freedom Theatre in Jenin camp April 2020. She also worked on her one-woman play Through Borders, that tells a story of love, land, and refugees. She finished the research and the outline of the story. In addition, she wrote four scenes for the the play and will use them to apply for budgets and grants to finish writing and produce the show 2020-2021.
Portrait by Saheer Oubaid
