Roger Assaf

A theater director and actor, he served as the director of the University Theater Center (C.U.E.D) at the Lebanese University from 1965 to 1968 and began work as a director at the Beirut Theater in 1966. In 1968, he co-founded the Beirut Atelier for Theater with Nidal al-Achkar, and he founded the Hakawati Theater in 1978. He worked as a professor at the Lebanese University's Institute for Fine Arts from 1966 to 2004 and as a professor at the Saint Joseph University from 1990 to 2016. In 1999, he founded the Shams Cultural Cooperative for Youth in Theater and Culture and he directed the Shams Youth Festival from 2000 to 2005. In 2005, he founded the Sunflower Cultural Centre. The recipient of numerous awards and honours, he was awarded Best Director and the Critics Award for Ayoub's Memoirs in the Cairo International Forum in 1994, the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2008 and the Order of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres from the French Ministry of Culture in 2013. Among his published works are: Dramatization: Masks of the City (1985), The Biography of the Theater: Luminaries and Works (2008-2012) and Theater in History (2017).