Rhiana Yazzie is a Navajo playwright, director, and filmmaker based in the Twin Cities and is artistic director of New Native Theatre, the most consistently producing professional theatre dedicated to telling Native stories in the Upper Midwest.

Rhiana is a 2020 Steinberg Award winning playwright as well as a 2018-20 Bush Foundation Leadership Fellow and a 2018-17 Sally Ordway Award winner for Vision. She’s been a Playwrights’ Center fellow multiple times: McKnight 2016/17 mid career playwriting fellowship, and Jerome Fellowship for Emerging Playwrights in 2006 & 2010.

She has just completed QUEEN CLEOPATRE AND PRINCESS POCAHONTAS a play commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the Public Theater for American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle. She is in post-production with her first feature film, A WINTER LOVE, which she is the writer/director and is starring in. She is a graduate of the University of Southern California’s Masters of Professional Writing where she produced events featuring Stephen Hawking, Madeleine Albright, Paula Vogel, Herbie Hancock, and Spalding Gray. She has been a production coordinator on films directed by Musa Syeed (A STRAY) and Dolly Wells (GOOD POSTURE). In the summer of 2020, she premiered her short film, TOBACCO IN SMOKE in Minneapolis produced by Motions Poems.

Her newest play, NANCY, loosely based on the life of First Lady Nancy Reagan and descendant of Pocahontas, will be work shopped at the Ruth Easton Play series at the Playwrights Center in Spring 2021. The story details how internalized racism over skin color, misogyny, and economic mobility create classism and racism inside tribal communities and shows how the most oppressed can become complicit in white supremacy.