Guest Artists

Masi Asare

Masi Asare headshot

Photo courtesy Masi Asare

About

Masi Asare is a composer, lyricist, playwright, and performance scholar. Her shows include: THE FAMILY RESEMBLANCE (book/music/lyrics, commissioned by Theatre Royal Stratford East, developed Eugene O’Neill Center); PARADISE SQUARE (lyrics), opening in Chicago in fall 2021 and Broadway in early 2022; the musical adaptation of Mira Nair’s film MONSOON WEDDING (lyrics), to tour internationally in 2022; MIRROR OF MOST VALUE (Concord/Samuel French), a one-act play for Marvel about teen super hero Kamala Khan aka Ms. Marvel featured on “Marvel’s 616” (Disney+); the spy musical SYMPATHY JONES (music/lyrics/concept, published by Playscripts); and commissions from Barbara Whitman/Grove Entertainment and Victory Gardens Theatre/Toulmin Foundation. A past Dramatists Guild Fellow, Masi won the inaugural Billie Burke Ziegfeld Award for a woman composer of musicals, plus awards for composition and lyrics from the O’Neill Center, a Theater Hall of Fame Emerging Artist Grant, and the Stacey Mindich “Go Write A Musical” Lilly Award. An advisory board member for Maestra Music, she holds a bachelor’s degree from Harvard and a PhD from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in performance studies. She is assistant professor of theatre and performance studies at Northwestern University, where she is a 2021-22 Faculty Fellow in the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities with research on vocal sound, black women, and musicals. She hosts and produces the pandemic-era podcast Voicing Across Distance on listening for voices across social distance, and her writing appears in The Dramatist, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Performance Matters, TDR (forthcoming), and Studies in Musical Theatre.