A conversation between Torange Yeghiazarian and Evren Odcikin moderated by Lisa Marie Rollins, Assistant Professor of Playwriting & Black Drama, Department of Performance Play and Design and Artistic Director of The Iris Lab.
Digital Arts Research Center (DARC) 108
University of California, Santa Cruz, 1156 High St, Santa Cruz, CA 95064
Free and open to the public – registration requested via Eventbrite
Evren Odcikin
EVREN ODCIKIN (he/him) is a Turkish-American director, writer, and arts leader based in New York City and San Francisco. He is a celebrated champion of historically-excluded voices in the American theater through work that is heart-centered, politically engaged, globally minded, and centers joy as resistance. He is committed to building his work with and for the communities it represents. He is the proud 2024-25 Artist in Residence at Golden Thread Productions and a 2025 Iris Lab Fellow with UC Santa Cruz. Recent directing: The Great Privation (How to flip ten cents into a dollar) by Nia Akilah Robinson (Soho Rep, NY Times Critic’s Pick), Macbeth and Mona Mansour’s unseen (Oregon Shakespeare Festival), Eric Reyes Loo’s Simple Mexican Pleasures (NCTC), christopher oscar peña’s our orange sky (Profile Theatre), Torch Song (Marin Theatre), Sylvia Khoury’s Selling Kabul (Northern Stage), as well as workshops of Adam Ashraf Elsayigh’s ALAA: A Family Trilogy (Berkeley Rep’s Ground Floor and Golden Thread) and Lauren Gunderson’s Muse of Fire (Prague Shakes, Utah Shakes, Marin Shakes, Magic Theatre). Playwriting and translation: Commissions, workshops, and productions at Cal Shakes, NYU Abu Dhabi, Golden Thread, Crowded Fire, and Custom Made. Evren served as the Interim Artistic Director at Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2023 where he was Associate Artistic Director and Director of Artistic Programming since 2019. He is a founding board member of Middle Eastern North African Theater Makers Alliance and a founder of Maia Directors. odcikin.com
Torange Yeghiazarian
Torange Yeghiazarian (she/her) Born in Iran and of Armenian heritage
Torange is one of our luminaries in American theater. She established the first American theatre company focused on the Middle East, Golden Thread Productions in 1996 and served as its Executive Artistic Director for the next twenty-five years. She has nurtured generations of Middle Eastern American talent through visionary programs such as the ReOrient Festival and the Forum, New Threads staged reading series, Fairytale Players youth outreach program, and What do the Women Say? showcase that lifts up the work of Middle Eastern women artists. n her capacity as artistic director, Torange co-authored the seminal papers, “Middle Eastern Theatre Artists’ Bill of Rights” and “Dear Producers,” and helped launch the Middle Eastern North African Theater Makers Alliance, the first national organization advocating for the MENA theater community. Torange’s latest play, THE TUTOR was commissioned and premiered by the New Conservatory Theater.
A tireless advocate for generative artists, Torange launched timely initiatives such as KIMIA to facilitate collaborative and devised play development; Islam 101 to create dynamic new work celebrating Islamic art and philosophy, and Middle East America – A National New Plays Initiative in partnership with Silk Road Rising and The Lark. To circumvent travel and visa restrictions of artists in the Middle East, in 2014 Torange devised Project Alo? teaming up US-based artists of Middle Eastern heritage with artists based in the Middle East to engage in a series of video dialogues created on their smartphones.
A playwright, director, and translator, Torange received a Gerbode-Hewlett Playwright Commission Award for ISFAHAN BLUES, a co-production with African American Shakespeare Company, and a commission from the Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California to write and direct THE FIFTH STRING – ZIRYAB’S PASSAGE TO CORDOBA. Other plays include 444 DAYS, WAVES, BEHIND GLASS WINDOWS, DAWN AT MIDNIGHT, ABAGA, THANKSGIVING AT KHODABAKHSHIAN’S, PUBLICLY RESTING, and CALL ME MEHDI, included in the anthology “Salaam. Peace – An Anthology of Middle Eastern-American Drama,” TCG, 2009. At Golden Thread, Torange directed OH MY SWEET LAND by Amir Nizar Zuabi, and the premieres of OUR ENEMIES – LIVELY SCENES OF LOVE AND COMBAT and SCENIC ROUTES by Yussef El Guindi, THE MYTH OF CREATION by Sadegh Hedayat, TAMAM by Betty Shamieh, STUCK by Amir Al-Azraki, VOICE ROOM by Reza Soroor, and adapted the poem, I SELL SOULS by Simin Behbehani for the stage.
Torange has translated a number of contemporary plays from Iran, including A MOMENT OF SILENCE by Mohammad Yaghoubi (winner of Best Play at Toronto Fringe), VOICE ROOM by Reza Soroor, and THE LANGUAGE OF WILD BERRIES by Naghmeh Samini. Her translation and stage adaptation of Nizami’s LEYLA & MAJNUN is published on Gleeditions.com. Torange has written about contemporary theatre in Iran and published in The Drama Review, American Theatre Magazine, AmerAsia Journal, and contributed to the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures and the Cambridge World Encyclopedia of Stage Actors. Torange contributed a chapter to “Casting a Movement” Routledge, 2019, and “Performing Iran – Culture, Performance, Theatre” Bloomsbury, 2021. Torange has been recognized by Theatre Bay Area and is one of Theatre Communication Group’s Legacy Leaders of Color. She was honored by the Cairo International Theatre Festival and the Symposium on Equity in the Entertainment Industry at Stanford University. Born in Iran and of Armenian heritage, Torange holds a Master’s degree in Theatre Arts from San Francisco State University.