aesthetic
We must humanize our enemies until there are no enemies left; until we are face to face with only our own failings. Then we must accept these failings because they are true. From there, it will be possible to try again, to both accept ourselves as we are and to push ourselves to do better.

biography
Mashuq Mushtaq Deen is a CORE writer at the Playwrights' Center and a resident playwright at New Dramatists. His works include award-wining play Draw the Circle (produced by InterAct Theatre, PlayMakers Rep, Mosaic Theatre, Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre; published by Dramatists Play Service), The Telegram (commissioned & produced by Keen Company), The Empty Place (co-commission NYU & New Dramatists, workshop production by NYU), Flood (upcoming world premiere at Kansas City Rep, 2023), The Betterment Society (published by Methuen Books UK in their anthology Methuen Drama Book of Trans Plays), award-winning play The Shaking Earth (Covid-canceled world premiere, National Queer Theater 2021), and Tank & Horse (world premiere at the Berkshire Fringe Festival).

Deen is the recipient of the Lambda Literary Award for Drama, First-Runner-Up for both the International Woodward Playwriting Prize and India's International Sulthan Padamsee Playwriting Prize. He is also one of the winners of the James Baldwin Playwriting Prize.

Deen's work has been supported with residencies by the Siena Art Institute, Sundance Theatre Institute & the Ucross Foundation, Blue Mountain Center, MacDowell (twice), Bogliasco Foundation, Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Chesley/Bumbalo Foundation, and Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation.

Deen's workd has been presented/developed/supported by a number of institutions including New Dramatists, The Public Theater, New York Theatre Workshop, Kansas City Rep, PlayMakers Rep, Keen Company, Target Margin Theatre, NYU, La Jolla Playhouse, New Harmony Project, SPACE at Ryder Farm, New York Foundation for the Arts, InterAct Theatre, Page73, Ma-Yi, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, Georgetown University, BEAT Festival. PACE University, Hampshire College, Averett University, Dixon Place, Passage Theatre, Queens Theatre in the Park, Tofte Lake Center, and the Berkshire Fringe Festival.

He has been listed on Steppenwolf's Mix List, the Kilroy's List (Honorable Mention 2017), a finalist for the Jerome New York Fellowship (twice), semifinalist or finalist for the O'Neill Conference (four times).

He is a member of the NYTW Usual Suspects, Ma-Yi Writers Lab, Public Theater Alumni Writers Group (co-founder), and the Dramatists Guild. He earned his MFA from the Actors Studio Drama School/New School for Drama. He is represented by the Gurman Agency LLC. In his spare time, Deen is a man of many hobbies and a student of the guitar and the Italian language.