ABOUT DARA BETH
Artist's Bio
Dara Beth is an angry Jewish feminist and award-winning director with a desire to tell stories.
Dara graduated from the University of Cape Town in 2016 with an Honours Degree in Theatre-Making and a distinction in Drama. Upon graduating, they were awarded the “Ruth Peffer’s Prize for Most Promising Student”.
As a theatre-maker, Dara has written and staged multiple original works for various festivals and theatres such as Nasty Womxn, Just A Song And A Dance, Lolly, and all my ex-lovers are dead to name a few. They have won Standard Bank Ovation Awards and have been nominated for Fleur du Cap, BroadwayWorld, and Kanna awards.
In 2021, Dara’s newest work, all my ex-lovers are dead, was staged as part of the Artscape’s New Voices Programme 2021. In 2022, Dara was shortlisted for the AWPN-Warwick Artist-In-Residence, selected for the Upper Jay Arts Centre CA+MP Artist-In-Residence programme, and chosen to participate in STAND Foundation’s Pen To Paper programme. At the start of 2023–as part of the Pen To Paper programme–all my ex-lovers are dead was awarded a fully-funded run at Woordfees in Stellenbosch, South Africa. Most recently, all my ex-lovers are dead was invited to be a part of the Curated Programme at the 50th edition of the National Arts Festival in Makhanda as well as the inaugural HEAT Winter Arts Festival in 2024.
Beyond theatre, Dara has begun to branch into film and television. In 2024, Dara joined their first writers' room for a new series being released on Showmax in 2025 and they are set to direct their first feature in 2025. Most recently, Dara co-wrote and produced AI Love You for the Cape Town 48 Hour Film Project which was nominated for best script, and won the Audience Choice Award and Award for Best Film.
When not producing their own work, Dara works as a mentor, director, and script supervisor, facilitating others’ creative journeys. In 2023, Dara was awarded a PESP grant from South Africa’s National Arts Council with which they founded Kgokelo, the South African Women And Gender-Diverse Playwrights Network and Database.
Artist's Statement
As a theatre-maker, I seek to enact the worlds which I dream of. I believe we have a responsibility to tell stories which offer a better future, by interrogating and reimagining the canon that has informed our past. My work uses mythology and literary allusions as a framework upon which to tell everyday contemporary stories that explore sex, sexuality, gender, identity, and intimacy. The thing that separates theatre from other forms of performance is its intimacy and sense of immediacy, its ability to take a moment and turn it into a world. And its ability to take us out of the world and key us into a single moment.
My function is to offer people these worlds and moments through which to extend their view of our world. Through tales that are raunchy, witty, tongue-in-cheek, high-energy, bubblegum pop, biting, quirky, honest, unflinching, and occasionally self-indulgent and overly romantic, I aim to evoke a sense of joy, inspire connections, and instigate a pleasurable form of introspection
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Headshot by Canned Rice Productions | Photo of Panicked Director and Stressed Actor by Maggie Gericke