Hanna Eady


Hanna Eady is a Palestinian-American actor and playwright best known for co-writing Suhmata, a play about the destruction of the Palestinian Arab village of Suhmata, near Acre in what is now northern Israel.
Eady was born in 1956 in the village of Buqu'ya in the Upper Galilee region of Israel, and took an interest in theater from an early age. He earned a B.A. in social work from the University of Haifa, and then worked as the artistic director of a theater. He then moved to the United States to study theater, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts in theater from the University of Wisconsin and a Master of Fine Arts in drama and directing from the University of Washington in Seattle.
After obtaining his third academic degree, Eady opened the New Image Theater Company, where he wrote and produced numerous plays, including Seeing Double and Abraham's Land. The play Suhmata, which he co-wrote with Edward Mast, depicts the 1948 destruction of a Palestinian village of that name during the 1948 Palestine war. The play debuted in Seattle in 1996 and has since been performed in various theaters in the United States, Europe and the Middle East.