Adam Elsayigh

ERI/PS2 Public Research Fellow

Cairo-born and Dubai-raised, Adam Ashraf Elsayigh is a playwright, dramaturg, and Ph.D. candidate in Theatre and Performance at the CUNY G.C. His plays – including Alaa: A Family Trilogy and Drowning in Cairo – have been developed or presented by NYTW, The Lark, Sundance, and Golden Thread. A Lucille Lortel Awards voter, in 2025, Adam was selected as World Theatre Day’s U.S. Emergent Artist. He holds a BA from NYU Abu Dhabi, MFA from Brooklyn College, and is a Georgetown Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics fellow.

Off-Broadway’s programming choices are usually explained through artistic vision. This summer, I’m testing a competing hypothesis: that money is doing a lot of the deciding. I’ll be building a public dataset tracking financial and programming records across four major Off-Broadway institutions from 2008 to 2025, developing early visualizations that map the relationship between funding structures and curatorial choices, and beginning conversations with artists about whether the patterns in the data match what they’ve already felt in the room. My aim is to turn shared intuition into a public resource the field can build on, argue with, and use. Elsayigh is a 2026 ERI/PS2 Summer Fellow.