aesthetic
I do not make "content." I make art. "Real art has the capacity to make us nervous," said Susan Sontag.
Rumi has a poem that goes: "The way of love is not a subtle argument. The door there is devastation. Birds make great sky-circles of their freedom. How do they learn it? They fall, and falling, they're given wings." ... I am particularly interested in the heroic journeys of the heart.
biography
Mashuq Mushtaq Deen is an award-winning resident playwright at New Dramatists, a core writer at the Playwrights Center, and winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Draw The Circle (productions: PlayMakers Rep, Mosaic Theatre, Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre; published: Dramatists Play Service). His other full-length plays include Flood (covid-canceled production at Kansas City Rep), The Empty Place (NYU/New Dramatists Joint Commission), The Betterment Society (upcoming publication), The Shaking Earth (covid-postponed production, National Queer Theater), and Tank & Horse (world premiere at the Berkshire Fringe Festival).
Deen’s work has been presented/developed/supported by a number of institutions including New Dramatists, Sundance Theatre Institute & the Ucross Fundation, Blue Mountain Center, The Public Theater, NYTW, MacDowell Colony, Bogliasco Foundation, Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, NYU, La Jolla Playhouse, New Harmony Project, Chesley/Bumbalo Foundation, Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation, SPACE at Ryder Farm, New York Foundation for the Arts, InterAct Theatre, Page73, Ma-Yi, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, Georgetown University, BEAT Festival, PACE University, Hampshire College, Averett University, Dixon Place, Passage Theatre, Queens Theatre in the Park, Tofte Lake Center, and the Berkshire Fringe Festival.
Awards and nominations include: Lambda Literary Award for Drama (2019), James Baldwin Award, Dennis Johnston Playwriting Prize honorable mention, and a nomination for the Weissberger Award. His has been listed on Steppenwolf's Mix List, the Kilroy’s List (Honorable Mention 2017), a finalist for the Jerome New York Fellowship (twice), semifinalist for the O'Neill Conference (twice), and finalist for the Playwrights Center Core Writers.
He is a member of the NYTW Usual Suspects, Ma-Yi Writers Lab, founder of the Public Theater Alumni Writers Group, and the Dramatists Guild. He earned his MFA from the Actors Studio Drama School/New School for Drama. He is represented by the Gurman Agency LLC and is a member of the Dramatists Guild. In his spare time, Deen is also a participating citizen (#flarebkny) and a man of many hobbies, including bread-baker, soap-maker, and student of the guitar.