Banna Desta

Artist Statement

As a child of Ethiopian and Eritrean immigrants, stories of my history and cultural experiences were verbally shared, but our written history has been sabotaged by neglect from scholars, lost records and the African dependency on oral tradition. Writing plays is a way of mending broken history. I write plays because I want to ask questions about the history of my ancestors, confronted with a new cultural code in the United States, in a way that can effectively instruct and delight an audience. There are simply too few stories that center African life in American theater. It must be said that African history is American history. It is imperative to give it the same value granted to theater in the rest of the world. I am pleased to tell new stories with a fresh perspective through drama.

A flyer from my 2024 immersive theater piece, Midnight in Abyssinia featuring traditional Ge'ez script.

Bio

Banna Desta is an Eritrean and Ethiopian-American writer for the screen and stage who crafts stories about and for the African diaspora. She is the author of The Abyssinians (Audible), Midnight in Abyssinia currently in development with La MaMa’s CultureHub and The Africa Center, Red Taxi, Bygone Fruit which premiered at the 2024 Women in Theater Festival and Pining which premiered at Rattlestick Theater and was published in Samuel French in 2019. Her work for the stage has been supported and workshopped by Atlantic Theater Company, National Black Theatre, The New Group and the Dramatists Guild Foundation. She has held residencies at SPACE on Ryder Farm, Art Omi and Tofte Lake Center. She was a staff writer for the BET+ series First Wives Club (Netflix Top Ten). She has assisted multiple television series in both the writers room and on set, including FOX’s Filthy Rich, NBC’s This Is Us, and AMAZON’s Harlem. She has held fellowships with Sun Valley Writers Conference, Marcie Bloom Fellowship in Film and The Gotham Film and Media Institute. She was awarded the John Golden Prize for excellence in playwriting at NYU, where received her MFA in Dramatic Writing where she currently teaches undergraduate students.