Banna Desta is an Eritrean & Ethiopian-American playwright and screenwriter who crafts stories about and for the African diaspora. Her short play Pining premiered at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater and was published by Samuel French in 2019. She assistant directed the 2018 production of Thom Pain: based on nothing at the Signature Theater in New York. She is a playwright at La MaMa’s Experiments in Digital Storytelling program and the 2020 recipient of National Black Theater’s Soul Series Lab. She was a finalist for the 2019 & 2020 Van Lier New Voices Fellowship, the 2019 Fulbright, Creative & Performing Arts Fellow and semifinalist for the 2020 I AM SOUL Residency at the National Black Theater.
She wrote and co-produced the short film, Akinyi + Yvonne, which was the official selection for the Vail Film Festival, George Lindsey UNA Film Festival, CR8:BLK Film Festival and Film North Screening Series. She is a 2019 Marcie Bloom Fellow in Film. She is the co-creator of the webseries Youth, etc., called “The Best New Webseries” by the Guardian in 2018.
She has assisted multiple television series (Filthy Rich, This Is Us) and was recently the showrunner’s assistant to Tracy Oliver for the BET+ series First Wives Club. She is currently a writer’s assistant for the Apple TV+ series If/Then. She was awarded the John Golden Prize for excellence in playwriting at NYU, where she received her MFA in Dramatic Writing.
Prior to a career in the arts, she worked in the media landscape for U.S. News & World Report, the Washington Post, and Viacom Media Networks.