Mashuq Mushtaq Deen
Playwriting
Bronx, NY
Mashuq Mushtaq Deen is a playwright and essayist interested in the careful devastation of his audience. Residencies and awards have brought him to diverse national and international geographies, and he is curious about the ways those varied landscapes contribute to our value systems and to our divisions. Traversing the changing landscape of age, and the way it forms our subjective realities, is also of particular interest. He often writes in relief, often from perspectives diametrically opposed from his own, and with a focus on the possibility and utility of compassion and forgiveness in impossible situations. His award-winning work has tackled the gender, state-sponsored violence, mathematics, apocalyptic futures, as well as surreal and absurdist theatrical forms. He prioritizes process over product, and believes the process of making art, and the artist themselves, are the most important mediums that the artist works with.
Deen’s work has been published in books and magazines, and his theatrical work has been produced across the country:
His nonfiction narrative essays have been published in the following print anthologies: The Journal of Asian American Studies, Our Stories: A Introduction to South Asian America, This Alien Nation, and most recently in Surviving Transphobia. His theatrical works have been published by Dramatists Play Service and Methuen Books (UK), and include two full-length and three short plays. He is the recipient of the Lambda Literary Award for Drama, and First-Runner Up for both the International Woodward Playwriting Prize and India’s Sulthan Padamsee’s Playwriting Prize. A CORE writer at the Playwrights Center (3-year residency) and an alum of New Dramatists (7-year residency), his produced theatrical works include Draw the Circle, The Telegram, Set Zero, Flood, and though not produced, The Betterment Society has been published in an anthology of trans plays and The Shaking Earth was a medalist for two awards.
His work has been supported with residencies at the Siena Art Institute, Sundance Theatre Institute at Ucross, Blue Mountain Center, MacDowell (twice), Bogliasco Foundation, Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, SPACE at Ryder Farm, and by foundational grants from the Chesley/Bumbalo Foundation, Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation, NYFA, Bronx Cultural Council, and TCG.
His work has been presented and/or developed by a number of institutions including The Public Theater, New York Theatre Workshop, Kansas City Rep, PlayMakers Rep, New Dramatists, Keen Company, Target Margin Theatre, NYU, La Jolla Playhouse, New Harmony Project, New York Foundation for the Arts, Page73, Ma-Yi, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, Georgetown University, Duke University, BEAT Festival, PACE University, Hampshire College, Averett University, Dixon Place, Passage Theatre, Queens Theatre in the Park, Tofte Lake Center, and the Berkshire Fringe Festival.
He earned his MFA from the Actors Studio Drama School/New School for Drama. He is represented by the Gurman Agency LLC.