Naghmeh Samini is a playwright and theatre director born in Iran. After receiving her BA in Drama and MA in Cinema both from University of Tehran, she earned her PhD in drama and mythology from Tarbiat Modares University in Tehran. More than twenty of her plays have been staged and have had theatrical readings in Iran and internationally. Her plays, screenplays and scholarly books and articles are widely published in Iran. As a researcher, she has published several books and articles, contributing significant research on A Thousand and One Nights and on mythology in Iranian dramatic literature. In 2017 she won the Best Iranian Playwright award for her play Home from the Society of Playwrights at Iran’s Home of Theatre. Her play the Fiction of the King and the Mathematician was selected by UNESCO in 2012 as one of the cultural achievements of the year. In 2005 she started to teach at University of Tehran, College of Fine Arts. She is currently a visiting scholar at the School of Drama and has been affiliate professor at the Dept. of Middle Eastern Languages and Culture at University of Washington since 2019.