Raya Tuffaha

Raya is a Palestinian fight director, actor and writer from Seattle. She aims to balance the search for the unexpected with the truth of each artistic moment. / She came to theatre from a Jordanian ballet company, where she found her love for physical storytelling. Her acting training started in middle school and hasn’t stopped! She studied at the British American Drama Academy, then returned to Philadelphia to further train in acting; she found great joy in solo performance and fight direction as well, and completed individual undergraduate theses in both fields. / After completing her fight thesis, she was awarded "Best Performer" for her work at the SAFD's 2023 National Stage Combat Workshop. Now, she continues training and working at theaters in the Seattle area. Raya is passionate about crafting muscular, nuanced stories, and believes fight choreography is a powerful tool for every body. As she pursues training as an intimacy professional, she finds this to be even more apparent. / Raya is the author of "To All the Yellow Flowers" (Golden Antelope Press, 2020), which won the Swarthmore Intercultural Center Arts in Activism Award and was listed in Ms. Magazine's 2020 National Poetry Month Roundup, and "apocalypse blues" (2022), from which selected poems were featured in Moonstone Arts Center's 26th Annual Poetry Ink Anthology. In 2021, she and former Seattle Youth Poet Laureate Bitaniya Giday took runner-up in Button Poetry's Emerging Poets video competition category. Other publications include Mizna Online, Phoebe Journal and Succarnochee Review. She’s currently working on a new libretto through the Seattle Opera. / Though her favorite narratives usually involve ghosts, pirates, or sweeping romance, Raya is always excited about stories grounded in community. “Let it be a tale.”