I am Monirah Hashemi, a performer, director, and playwright from Afghanistan.

My work begins with what is silenced: gestures that are forbidden, stories that are interrupted, bodies that are regulated or erased. I work with performance and storytelling as practices of survival, paying attention to how violence, memory, resistance, and exile live in the body.

Rather than treating the body as a tool, I approach it as a place of knowledge — an archive shaped by lived experience. My performances are often built through long processes of listening, repetition, and endurance, where silence is not empty but charged, and where what cannot be spoken still finds form.

Much of my work is shaped by women’s experiences of restriction and resistance, particularly in response to the gender apartheid enforced by the Taliban. Sharing stories under such conditions is not symbolic; it is a way of staying present, of insisting on continuity.

© JennyLeyman

Alongside my performance work, I have co-founded artistic initiatives rooted in cultural preservation and collective memory. In 2013, I co-founded A Night With Buddha, created to commemorate the destroyed Buddha statues of the Bamiyan Valley and to foreground women as narrators of tangible and intangible heritage. Earlier, in 2005, I co-founded the Simorgh Film Association of Culture and Art, using film and theatre to engage with urgent social realities.

My practice moves between theatre, performance, and interdisciplinary formats, and is developed through long-term collaborations across different cultural and geographic contexts.