Kadour Wael

Born in Syria in 1981, Wael Kadour is a writer, playwright, and director. He graduated from the Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts in Damascus in 2006 and took part in several international residencies, including the dramaturgy residency at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 2007, the Sundance Institute of Playwrights residency in Berlin in 2017, and the Lark Theatre Lab in New York in 2018.

From 2008 onward, he served as artistic collaborator and dramaturge on numerous projects in Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, and since arriving in Europe, in France, Germany, and Sweden. He left Syria at the end of 2011 for Jordan, where he spent four years before arriving in Paris in early 2016. Between 2011 and 2014, he directed plays by Samuel Beckett, Edward Albee, Caryl Churchill, Saadallah Wannous, and Mudar Al Haggi. After Les petites chambres, created in Beirut and Amman in 2014, he co-directed another of his plays, Chroniques d’une ville qu’on croit connaître, with Mohamad Al Rashi in 2019. In late 2011, he co-founded Ettijahat, an independent cultural organization run by a group of Syrian cultural activists; he served as its communications director from 2016 to 2021.

From 2012 to 2017, he was editor-in-chief of the website Cultural Policy in the Arab World (ARCP). In 2021, he received support from the Ibsen Scope Foundation in Norway to write and produce the play Up-There, based on testimonies from former political prisoners who staged Henrik Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea at the women’s prison in Douma, Syria, in 1991. In 2024, with Perseïden and Mohamad Al Rashi, he began directing his text Braveheart. Several of his plays have been published in Arabic, English, French, and Italian and staged by other directors in Lebanon, Egypt, Italy, and Germany. He is a member of the Agency of Artists in Exile.