Golden Thread Announces New Executive Artistic Director Sahar Assaf (she/her) is a Lebanese theatre maker and teacher who has been active in the Lebanese theatre scene since 2003.by BWW News Desk Golden Thread has announced that Sahar Assaf is the new Artistic Director. Following a global search, Sahar has relocated from Lebanon to San Francisco to helm the now 25 year old production company beginning May 3rd, following the stepping down of founding Artistic Director Torange Yeghiazarian. Sahar Assaf (she/her) is a Lebanese theatre maker and teacher who has been active in the Lebanese theatre scene since 2003 as an actor, director, translator, and producer. She's presented works in Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Belgium, London, Sweden, Poland, Greece, Chicago, and NYC. With her long term collaborator, playwright Robert Myers, Sahar co-founded the Theater Initiative at the American University of Beirut, an interdisciplinary group of faculty and artists working to facilitate theatre creation and research locally, regionally, and internationally. Her work at the Theater Initiative inlcudes the direction of Garcia-Lorca's Blood Wedding as a site-specific promenade performance in the village of Hammana in Mount Lebanon, Shakespeare's King Lear (co-directed with Rachel Valentine Smith of The Faction ensemble of London) which was the first production of a Shakespearean play in Lebanese colloquial Arabic, The Rape and Rituals of Signs and Transformations by Sa'dallah Wannous, and Watch Your Step: Beirut Heritage Walking Tour which was a site-specific devised work on the Lebanese civil war. A strong advocate of documentary theatre, Sahar recently conceived and directed Meen El Felten, an immersive documentary play on sexual assault in Lebanon as part of the Abaad MENA campaign of 2018 and No Demand No Supply, a documentary play about sex trafficking and prostitution in collaboration with the Kafa organization.