Raven Cassell
2025 HEAR US Awardee
Dramatic Writing Class of 2025
Raven Cassell is a Liberian-American dramatist at Tisch Graduate Dramatic Writing, based in NYC and West Africa. She is a playwright, television writer and screenwriter telling stories about global black culture.
Project
Africanist Storytelling: The West African Way of Dramatic Art
Raven is coining the term Africanist Storytelling. She describes it as work dealing with African continental and diasporic concerns, affairs and themes — centering African storytelling methodologies, ideologies and technologies. As a theoretical framework to accompany her work and a resource and point of reference for her contemporaries, Raven is developing the book project, Africanist Storytelling: The West African Way of Dramatic Art; a collection of essays, interviews, images, experiments, drama exercises and findings on West African dramatic art. Through field work she will be living and learning in storytelling communities in West Africa and then conducting workshops to experiment with these Africanist modalities via self-designed and devised writing and drama labs.