Monirah Hashemi is a playwright and theater director. Her family migrated to Iran 30 years ago and she was born there in 1985 and she came back with her family to Afghanistan in 2003 and settled in Herat. She start working in cinema as an actress in 2004 and in 2005 established “Simorgh Film Association of Culture and Art) with some of her friends. They start with a film company and in 2007 established theater department within Simorgh Film and later the children theater department in 2009. Since 2004 she has been working as an actress, screen writer and film director but in 2007 she joined to the “Educational Theater Festival” organized in Herat. A competition between girls and boys high school and there she wrote and directed her first play by the name of “Cry of History”. The play won the first prize of the festival and this success brought her to a new world, to the fans of theater.
Since then she has written many plays performed in different festivals in Kabul, India, Germany, Turkey and Sweden, and also she worked with Helena Waldmann from Germany on play by the name of “Burka Bondage” as Afghan Coach. Also she has been a panelist member in the 3rd South Asia Theater Festival in New Jersey, USA in 2010.
Recently she and a group of volunteers organized a theater festival by the name of “A Night with Buddha” in Bamiyan on 11th of March 2013. The day the statues of Bamiyan exploded by Taliban.