- From Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Graduated from Brown University.
Spent a year working with acting theorist and pioneer, Jerzy Grotowski (Towards a Poor Theater).
Has taught acting on his own and alongside Andre Gregory in New York City & Vienna, Austria.
Alumnus of the Graduate Film Program at Columbia University, with a degree in directing. Winner of a New York Documentary Center's Young Documentary Filmmakers' Award, an IFP Audience Choice Award and Programming Committee's Award for Best Film at the 2003 Columbia University Film Festival.
Author of numerous plays and screenplays. Ayad was star and co-writer of The War Within (Magnolia), which was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay.
His first novel, American Dervish, is being published by Little, Brown and Company in January 2012.- IMDb mini biography by: Michael G. Pollard
- His play, Disgraced, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2013.
- He was nominated at the 2005 Independent Spirit Awards for Best Screenplay for The War Within.
- He was awarded the 2012 Equity Joseph Jefferson Award for New Work for "Disgraced" at the American Theater Company in association with The Araca Group in Chicago, Illinois.
- His play, "The Invisible Hand," at the Steep Theatre Company in Chicago, Illinois was nominated for a 2018 Non-Equity Joseph Jefferson Award for Play Production.
- I don't feel that as an artist my job is to offer PR propaganda, whether for the good or for the bad.
- I started to understand that for me, art was no longer about self-expression but about creative engagement with the world. I started to respond in an excited way to making work inside an industry and not feeling the constraints of audience expectation as some kind of thing that I should avoid.
- I see the American experience as being defined by the immigrant paradigm of rupture and renewal: rupture with the old world, the old ways, and renewal of the self in a bright but difficult New World.
- In my early 30s, I started to realise I was avoiding something on a personal level, but also as a writer. I was in denial about who I was, and was trying to be someone who I was not.
- Sooner or later we've all got to confront the reality that we have got to come to understand who we are and what we're doing, and the extent to which we are guided or manipulated by forces that are beyond our control.
Contribute to this page
Suggest an edit or add missing content