Mona Mansour grew up in a Southern California suburb, the daughter of a Lebanese immigrant father and American mother from Seattle. Global politics were brought inside when various cousins, uncles and aunties came to live with the family during the Lebanese Civil War.
She moved to New York in the wake of the Sept. 11th attacks, when the Middle Eastern theater community was fired up by an urgent need to change the narrative around Arab-Americans. The questions around her own father, who left Lebanon by choice, took her to his village in Southern Lebanon, and an examination of the “villages” next to it — the Palestinian camps Mieh-Mieh and Ain El Hilweh. This notion of displacement became a central theme she began to explore and inspired her to create the play Urge for Going in what would become The Vagrant Trilogy. The Vagrant Trilogy premiered at the Mosaic in Washington, D.C. in June 2018 and then made its NYC debut at The Public Theater (2022) directed by Mark Wing-Davey.
In 2019, Mona formed SOCIETY, with Scott Illingworth and Tim Nicolai. The aim was to create a company where work could be created, joint stock style, with improvisation, research, and discussion that involves every company member. Other credits: Unseen (Mosaic and OSF), The Way West at Labyrinth Theater and Steppenwolf.
She is co-writing a musical with singer-composer Hannah Corneau called Beautiful Little Fool, directed by Michael Greif. Her plays have been translated into Arabic, Italian, Romanian and Hungarian. She most recently wrote for the NBC drama New Amsterdam and is developing a TV project with Fisher Stevens’ Highly Flammable.