Nazareth Hassan (He/They) is an interdisciplinary writer, director, and musician.  Their work can look like scores, choreopoems, plays, instructions, collages, diagrams, songs, compositions, and prayers. Sometimes they perform in their own work, but most often, they don’t. Their work seeks to utilize the most potent aspects of theater as assembly: the multi-reflectional nature of seeing and being seen, where audiences come in contact with the breadth of their projections; writing for performance  as the poetry of time, space, and the body, where the audience and performers navigate the tension between a constructed planes and “reality” through various proxies; and pursuing ambivalence and hypocrisy as a practice, where emotionalities, psychologies, sociologies, temporalities and generations can lay side by side without reason, rejecting clarity (read: necessitating order) as the primary means of processing. The impetus for making their work is always self reflection and recognition. 

As a director, they are deeply compelled by the social experiment of theatre. Text, movement, and aesthetics are deeply intertwined versions of each other. The text is a hypothesis: a manifesto on gathering and assembly. The room, the rehearsal, is the proof and complication of the hypothesis, the manifesto in action. This involves facilitating self-recognition, vulnerable self-disclosure, groupthink, and hyper individuation.

Their play Vantablack was selected for Theatretreffen Stuckemarkt 2019, and has been workshopped at the Royal Court Theatre and Emory University. It also garnered them the 2017 Dramatist Guild Young Playwright Award.

Their choral text performance Untitled (1-5) was commissioned by The Shed in 2021 and was published by 3 Hole Press in 2022. A video and sound installation based on the text was shown at MINT Gallery in 2022.

Their solo performance Memory A was most recently shown at Museo Universario del Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico City in 2022.

Their play Bowl EP was long listed for the Brentwood Prize and was workshopped at The Vineyard Theatre.

Nazareth often performs with dancers, performance artists, and alone, improvising sound and music. Some of these performances   include Kinfolk Vol. 2: Butch Queen (Judson Church),  This House is Not a Home (Substance Skatepark/Public Theater),  and 4 x 15: (re)member (Bronx Botanical Gardens). 

Sound design and composition credits include The Trees (Playwrights Horizons) and A Song of Songs (Bushwick Starr). They have released three singles, available on all platforms.

They were the dramaturg at the Royal Court in 2022. 

Recent collaborators include Mariyea, z tye, Nile Harris, Malcolm X-Betts, Ta-Nia, Machel Ross, Clifford Prince King, ruth tang, Alex Romania, Agnes Borinsky, Garrett Allen, Tina Satter, Luke Jr, ringgold, Culdesac Records, and Playmachine.

They are a 2023 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow.