Betty Shamieh is a playwright, author, screenwriter, and actress. She is the author of fifteen plays. As a playwright, her off-Broadway premieres are The Black Eyed (New York Theatre Workshop) and Roar (The New Group), which was selected as a New York Times Critics Pick and is currently being taught at universities throughout the United States. Her recent European productions in translation include Again and Against (Playhouse Teater, Stockholm), The Black Eyed (Theater Fournos, Athens), and Territories (co-production of the Landes-Theatre and the 2009 European Union Capital of Culture Festival). The Machine was produced by Naked Angels and directed by Marisa Tomei. She was the 2009 artist-in-residence at Het Zuidelijk Toneel of Holland, where her play, Free Radicals, is slated for production in Dutch translation in 2011. Her comedy, As Soon as Impossible, was commissioned as part of the Time Warner Commissioning program. In 2007, she was the NEA/TCG playwright-in-residence at the Magic Theatre, where The Black Eyed and Territories had their world premieres. Her latest solo work, The Alter-Ego of an Arab-American Assimilationist, has been developed by the 2009 Hip Hop Theatre Festival and Voice & Vision.

She performed in her play of monologues Chocolate in Heat in three extended off-off-Broadway runs and over twenty university theatres. Shamieh received an Honorable Mention for her screenplay Anonymous from the Third Annual Writers Network Competition, and has mentored many young writers as a Screenwriting Professor at Marymount Manhattan College. Her essays have appeared in The American Theatre Reader, The Brooklyn Rail, Counterpunch, and Mizna. A graduate of Harvard College and the Yale School of Drama, she was a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant and selected as a Clifton Visiting Artist at Harvard in 2004. She was named as a Playwriting Fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies in 2006 and is currently serving on the playwriting advisory board for the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Shamieh recently completed her first novel and is a resident artist at HERE Arts Center, where her play The Strangest will be presented as part of the 2010 Culturemart Festival. Shamieh’s contributions to theatre and literature have not gone unnoticed. Her life and work has been the subject of features in the New York Times, Time Out, American Theatre magazine, Theater Bay Area, the Brooklyn Rail, San Francisco Chronicle, Svenska Dagbladet, Teaterstockholm, der Standard, Aramco Magazine, Kathimeiri, and the International Herald Tribune among others. A cartoon of ROAR appeared in the New Yorker’s “Goings on about Town” section. She is a member of New Dramatists, an affiliated artist of the New Group, and a New York Theatre Workshop Usual Suspect.