Rhiana Yazzie

Rhiana Yazzie (Playwright/Director) is a 2025 United States Artist Fellow. She is also a Lanford Wilson and Steinberg Award winning playwright, a director, and filmmaker. A Navajo Nation citizen (Ta’neeszahnii dóó Táchii’nii), she is the Artistic Director of New Native Theatre, which she started in 2009 as a response to the lack of connection and professional opportunities between Twin Cities theaters and the Native community and it is the recipient of a 2023 Headwaters Bush Prize for social justice. Rhiana has been a Bush Foundation Leadership Fellow and was recognized with a Sally Ordway Award for Vision. She's been a Playwrights' Center Fellow multiple times and last year she made her East Coast premiere with Nancy (2023 Kilroys) at Mosaic Theater Company. Nancy is the second play in a series about Pocahontas and her family, originally co-commissioned by The Public Theater and The Oregon Shakespeare Festival for the American Revolutions: United States History Cycle. She wrote and directed her play, The Other Children of the Sun, in February 2025 for The Kennedy Center and is currently writing plays for Long Wharf Theatre & Rattlestick Theater (co-commission), and the University of New Mexico. In 2023, she directed the US premiere of Missing at the Anchorage Opera and is now working on her first libretto, Little Ones. She wrote, produced, and directed her debut feature film A Winter Love, currently seen in mainstream and Indigenous film festivals globally.