Fargo Nissim Tbakhi

Biography

Fargo Nissim Tbakhi (b. 1997, Riverside, California) is a Palestinian American interdisciplinary artist currently living and working in Washington, DC, on Piscataway and Nacotchtank land. He earned his BA in Theater from Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ. His work spans performance, poetry, fiction, criticism, installation, and community-based art; across and between these disciplines, the work seeks to imagine and enact liberatory worlds for Palestinians, those they love, and those who love them.

He was awarded S&R Evermay’s Washington Award for Interdisciplinary Arts (2022), earned first place for the Palestinian Youth Movement’s Ghassan Kanafani Writing Scholarship (2018), and was a Pushcart Prize nominee (2018).

His performances have been programmed at OUTSider Fest, Mosaic Theater, the Arab-American National Museum, Washington Project for the Arts, Rhizome DC, the Capital Fringe Festival, the Rachel Corrie Foundation’s Shuruq Festival, INTER-SECTION Solo Fest, and elsewhere.

His writing is published widely, including in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Mizna, Protean Magazine, and elsewhere. He is the author of two full-length poetry collections: Terror Counter (2025) and Antigone. Velocity. Salt. (2027), both forthcoming from Deep Vellum.

He has received fellowships, residencies, or support from VisArts, Halcyon Arts Lab, the National Performance Network, the MAP Fund, Mosaic Theater, the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at ASU, and elsewhere. He has taught in the Theater department at Towson University, as well as given workshops or lectures at a number of educational and community spaces, including Naropa University, the Radius of Arab-American Writers, Western Washington University, Columbia University, the New School, and the grassroots fundraising effort Workshops4Gaza, among others.

Fargo Nissim Tbakhi lives and works in Washington, DC.