Yussef El Guindi


Yussef El Guindi is an Egyptian-American playwright. He writes full-length, one-act, and adapted plays on Arab-Muslim experience in the United States. He is best known for his 2005 play Back of the Throat and has been called "the most talented Arab American writer of political plays."

Background

Yussef El Guindi was born in 1960 in Egypt. His grandfather was director Zaki Toleimat, grandmother actress Rose al Yusuf, and his uncle writer Ihsan Abdel Koudous. At age three, he moved to London and received schooling in the UK and France. In 1982, he received a BA from the American University in Cairo. In 1983, he moved to the United States and received an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University. He then moved to Seattle, Washington, where in 1996 he became a US citizen.

Career

El Guindi became associated with Chicago's Silk Road Theatre Project, which produced three of his plays in quick succession. He became playwright-in-residence at Duke University, where he also taught playwriting for seven years.
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, interest in Arab American theatre grew. In 2005, his play Back of the Throat premiered, confronting anti-Arab sentiment in the US, and received notice from theatres, press, and academia.
Formerly literary manager in the early 2000s, El Guindi became an artistic associate at the Golden Thread Productions in San Francisco in the 2010s. In 2018, he also became a Core Company playwright member of ACT Theatre.
Theatres that have produced El Guindi's plays include: The Fountain Theatre, Furious Theatre Company, Artists Repertory Theatre, Portland Center Stage, ACT Theatre, The Wilma Theater, and Mosaic Theater Company. James Faerron has designed sets for his plays.

Awards

"Guindi's works focus on themes of the immigrant experience, cultural and political climates, and current issues facing Arab-Americans and Muslim Americans." El Guindi himself says that his plays may "pick Arab American or Muslim American characters... but they are essentially immigrant stories." In analyzing his work, Anneka Esch-Van Kan wrote:
Language in El Guindi’s plays is the basis of any construction of reality. While language as a general capacity to speak and as a system of signs is the basis of all distinctions, the differences between several languages play an important role as well. The language one speaks determines one’s perspective on the world, and the translation of meaning from one language into another never works out with complete clarity.
The Dramatist's Play Service and Theatre Forum has published El Guindi's plays.
Plays:
Books:
Actor-director Orson Welles, director Howard Hawks, and writer William Faulkner visited El Guindi's family home.
Sometimes his name is transliterated from Arabic into English with the surname hyphenated: "Yussef El-Guindi."