Please note the new date and time for this Workshop.
DDP Artistic Director and LMDA President Suzi Elnaggar walks participants through freelancing as an artist and dramaturg. This workshop focuses on three main areas: business and financial skills, professional skills, and work-life balance. Attendees will be asked to submit questions in advance of the workshop.
Learn about the business and financial skills that every artist needs, such as setting up business bank accounts, incorporation (LLC, personal business, etc), and tracking finances for taxes. Suzi will provide an overview of necessary professional skills, such as how to communicate with customers, employers, and partners, as well as tips for self-advocacy. The workshop will conclude with Suzi giving pointers for work-life balance: how to hold it all, when to monetize your hobbies and when not to, and how to still make time for yourself and loved ones.
DDP’s 101 Workshop sessions are designed for everyone, but will be especially valuable to emerging artists, those looking to brush up on basics, and those growing into their freelance career.
About the Presenter:
Suzi Elnaggar is an Egyptian American performance scholar, freelance dramaturg, and theatre maker. She is a multimodal artist who writes and performs work that investigates her relationship to culture, community, and self. She is the Producing Artistic Director of Backstitch Story Project, the Founder and Artistic Director of the Digital Development Project, and a founding member of the Chicago SWANA Collective. She is the LMDA president for 2026-28 and a 2021 Kennedy Center Dramaturgy Intensive Fellow and works as both a developmental and production dramaturg. She has two Bachelor's degrees, a BE in Secondary Education and a BA in Classics/Great Texts, an MA in Theatre Studies from Baylor University, and is a Ph.D. Candidate at Northwestern University in Interdisciplinary Theatre & Drama and Middle Eastern and North African Studies with a focus on feminist, liberatory, and protest performance in contemporary Egypt. Her work has been published in Asian Theatre Journal, Arab Stages, Review: The Journal of Dramaturgy, Theatre Times, and Theatre (Yale, upcoming issue). Her interests include recontextualizing Greek tragedy, myths, and folklore; postcolonial theatre contexts; decoloniality in performance; theatre of social change; the intersection of trauma and performance; transnational and migrant stories; and work that centers SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) and Arab experiences, especially those relating to Egypt.
Selected dramaturgy credits (Production & Developmental): HERitage emBODYment’s Sekhmet Unraveled; Silk Road Cultural Center and Stage Center Theatre’s Full-On Cleopatra by Yussef El Guindi (Reading and Workshop Production); Silk Road’s Shahadat (The Testimonies); Backstitch Story Arts’ Off-White: The Arab House Party Play. Find her at suzielnaggar.com and on Substack.
