Rhiana Yazzie is a 2025 United States Artist Fellow. She is also a Lanford Wilson and Steinberg Award winning playwright, a director, TV writer and filmmaker. A Navajo Nation citizen (Ta’neeszahnii dóó Táchii’nii), she is the Artistic Director of New Native Theatre, which she started in 2009 as a response to the lack of connection and professional opportunities between Twin Cities theaters and the Native community and it is the recipient of a 2023 Headwaters Bush Prize for Social Justice. Rhiana’s work in theater has had an important impact on growing the artform in Minnesota for the last 19 years; she has been a Bush Foundation Leadership Fellow and was recognized with a Sally Ordway Award for Vision and she's been a Minneapolis Playwrights' Center Fellow multiple times (Jerome Fellowship...
Rhiana Yazzie is a 2025 United States Artist Fellow. She is also a Lanford Wilson and Steinberg Award winning playwright, a director, TV writer and filmmaker. A Navajo Nation citizen (Ta’neeszahnii dóó Táchii’nii), she is the Artistic Director of New Native Theatre, which she started in 2009 as a response to the lack of connection and professional opportunities between Twin Cities theaters and the Native community and it is the recipient of a 2023 Headwaters Bush Prize for Social Justice. Rhiana’s work in theater has had an important impact on growing the artform in Minnesota for the last 19 years; she has been a Bush Foundation Leadership Fellow and was recognized with a Sally Ordway Award for Vision and she's been a Minneapolis Playwrights' Center Fellow multiple times (Jerome Fellowship 2006 & 2010, McKnight Playwriting Fellow, and Playwrights Center Core Writer).
Her most recent play, The Nut, The Hermit, The Crow, and The Monk debuted in the Twin Cities at New Native Theatre in April 2025 co-directed with Amber Ball. Last year, she made her East Coast premiere with Nancy (2023 Kilroys List for Nationally recognized female written plays) at Mosaic Theater Company. Nancy is the second play in a series about Pocahontas and her family, originally co-commissioned by The Public Theater and The Oregon Shakespeare Festival for the American Revolutions: United States History Cycle.
Reviews of Rhiana’s work constantly point out their complicated and important storylines that always keep the audience visually and mentally stimulated and emotionally satisfied. She always focuses on telling stories specifically for Native audiences while aiming to leave them in a better place than she found them; she invites all audiences to follow the emotional journey of her characters to better understand the Native experience rather than catering to and focusing on educating non-Native patrons.
She is one of the few women to have written and directed a play for The Kennedy Center: The Other Children of the Sun, which debuted in February 2025. She is currently writing plays for Long Wharf Theatre & Rattlestick Theater (co-commission), DC’s Solas Nua & Dublin’s Fishamble Theatre (co-commission), and the University of New Mexico. In 2023, she directed the US premiere of Missing at the Anchorage Opera and is now working on her first libretto, Little Ones with Annishinaabe composer, Danielle Jagelski. She wrote, produced, and directed her debut feature film A Winter Love, currently seen in mainstream and Indigenous film festivals globally. Among its recognitions, it won Best Narrative Feature in the Minnesota Film Festival. She is a graduate of the University of Southern California’s Masters of Professional Writing where she produced events featuring Stephen Hawking, Herbie Hancock, and Spalding Gray. Rhiana wrote on AMC’s Dark Winds seasons 2 & 3 and is working on her second feature film, an adaptation of a play called Wounspaye Wankatya, A College Education.