Tina Fakhrid-Deen is a playwright, author, LGBTQ family activist, and professor at Oakton Community College whose writing and research interests include critical race and feminist theory, hip-hop culture, and urban education. She is the author of Let’s Get This Straight: The Ultimate Handbook for Youth with LGBTQ Parents. She was the recipient of Oakton Community College's 2018 Ray Hartstein Award for Outstanding Professional Excellence in Teaching. Her play, Powerless Gods, was produced at Oakton Community College in spring 2018. It was a semi-finalist for the Bay Area Playwriting Festival (2019) and O’Neill Playwriting Conference (2016/2018). Her second play, Dandelions, is the "In the Works" commission for Theatre on the Lake, and will receive a developmental production as part of their 2020 season. Her third play, Pulled Punches, was developed through the Women’s Theatre Alliance of Chicago in 2019 and its world premiere is slated for April 2020 with MPAACT at the Greenhouse Theater. She is a 2018 Kimbilio Fellow and VONA Fellow in Fiction and Playwriting (2011/2017). Her essays, cultural commentary, and poetry have been published in anthologies and media outlets such as Without A Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class, Sometimes Rhythm, Sometimes Blues: Young African-Americans on Love, Relationships, Sex, and the Search for Mr. Right, Homegirls Make Some Noise: Hip-Hop Feminism Anthology, Families Like Mine: Children of Gay Parents Tell It Like It Is, Jet Magazine, Tidal Basin Review, Scott Foresman, The Root, NPR: Eight-Forty-Eight, News One/Amtrak, and The Laura Berman Show on Oprah Radio.
While at MacDowell, she edited her play, Pulled Punches, and her young adult novel, Puma is Not a Shoe. She completed a first draft of her play Squat/Faux Show and began a draft of another play, Something Different (working title). It is a drama about an African-American study abroad student who flees to England to figure out her life and get away from her family’s expectations. She falls hard for a Muslim British-Pakistani grad student with demons and tribulations of his own. They have so much in common, yet still seem worlds apart. Should she open herself up to a complicated love and new beginnings or is that just more drama for her to run away from? This play will investigate tradition, religion, reinvention, and family. It will also explore belonging, identity politics, the recurrent rise of global white nationalism, resistance, and self-discovery.
