Musician in Residence, 2022-2023
Lama El Homaïssi, she/her, (SHIM:NYC Resident for 2022) is a Lebanese performer, writer and voiceover artist currently based in New York City.
Lama started her career in entertainment working for years as a television writer in Lebanon, creating original shows for the Sony Pictures Television Arabia and Talpa Middle East catalogs, developing commissions for clients, as well as adapting productions to the SWANA region (most notably The Voice and So You Think You Can Dance).
In 2017, Lama pursued her MFA in Musical Theater at Boston Conservatory at Berklee where she honed her skills in acting and storytelling through song, then began developing and performing her own work for the stage. Her capstone project Article 534 was a play about queer identity, resistance and safe havens in Beirut that combined storytelling with music. The project is titled after the archaic article in the Lebanese penal code that criminalizes the LGBTQIA+ community, deeming queer relations “contrary to the order of nature” to this day.
While in Boston, Lama served as a dramaturgy assistant on Daniel and Patrick Lazour’s We Live in Cairo, a new musical about the 2011 Egyptian uprising that premiered at American Repertory Theater in 2019. She contributed Arabic lyrics to the song “Tahrir Is Now” on the Lazour brothers’ album Flap My Wings: Songs from We Live in Cairo, released in 2020. Lama later went on to work as a Dramaturgy and Publications Assistant for A.R.T.’s 2019-2020 season and was involved as a storyteller and singer in several community engagement and education events in both Boston and New York City.
As part of her SHIM:NYC residency, Lama is writing and developing a new play with music, Missing (working title), which is a story of diaspora, coping with loss, and a generational gift that comes calling.
Venues Lama has performed at include Club OBERON, Joe’s Pub, Berklee Performance Center, and Lincoln Center’s David Rubenstein Atrium and Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse.
Lama’s writing has also been featured in the Brooklyn Rail and her essay on Storytelling as an Act of Survival has been published in HowlRound Theatre Commons.
For more, visit: lama-elhomaissi.com
