Raya Tuffaha

Raya is a Palestinian fight director, actor, writer, and emerging intimacy coordinator from Seattle. She’s interested in muscular stories. / 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 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.