Sanaz Toossi is an American playwright and screenwriter. Her play English won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2023.^[1]

Of Iranian descent, Toossi is from Orange County, California;^[2] her mother emigrated to the United States after the Iranian Revolution.^[3] She is an only child,^[4] and grew up a self-described "weird theatre kid".^[5] She graduated from the Tisch School of the Arts in 2018,^[3] having previously received her bachelor's degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara.^[6] Her plays are drawn from personal experience, and the experiences of her family.^[4][3]

Her first two major plays first opened in New York in early 2022, in off-Broadway theaters. English opened at the Atlantic Theater Company in February 2022, and Wish You Were Here opened at Playwrights Horizons in April 2022.^[4]

Toossi originally wrote English as her NYU graduate school thesis. She described it as an angry reaction to President Trump's 2017 executive order, known as the "Muslim ban", prohibiting travel to the United States from Iran and six other Muslim-majority states. The play is a comedy set in a schoolroom in Karaj, Iran where a teacher is teaching the English language to four adult students. Helen Shaw wrote in a February 2025 review in The New Yorker that English addresses "the way half-learned languages can rub against one another, sometimes erasing aspects -- compassion, graciousness, humor -- of the person using them." Shaw added, "for all the precise realism of the play's setting and dialogue, Toossi seems to be writing allegorically about a wider experience, perhaps one familiar to her, of the immigrant's double consciousness."^[4][7]

The first production of English, scheduled for 2020 at the Roundabout Underground Black Box Theatre, was postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The play opened at the Atlantic Theater Company, in a co-production with the Roundabout Theatre Company, in February 2022. English was staged in 2023 and 2024 across North America, in Boston; Washington, D.C.; Toronto; Montreal; Berkeley, California; Atlanta; Pittsfield, Massachusetts; Seattle; Chicago; and Minneapolis, and made its Broadway debut in January 2025, at the Todd Haimes Theater.^[8][9]

Toossi wrote Wish You Were Here long after English, though it debuted first. It is a drama, also set in Karaj, in which five women talk about their lives over thirteen years beginning in 1978. Shaw's New Yorker review describes Wish You Were Here as "gorgeous," stating "I was reminded of how brilliantly Toossi can write for people who don't understand their own motivations," and that in it, compared to English, "the playwright demonstrates far more comfort with elision and, ironically, with the unspoken."^[7][10]

Wish You Were Here premiered on July 1, 2020 at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Its off-Broadway debut at Playwrights Horizons began previews April 13, 2022 and officially opened on April 13, 2022. Its run there was extended at least twice. Toossi acted in that performance, playing the role of Rana, on May 21 and 22, 2022.^[10][11]

In 2020, Toossi was one of 20 playwrights named as winners of the Steinberg Playwright Awards by the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust.^[12] In 2022 the Dramatists Guild of America names Toossi as winner of the Horton Foote Award, for "a dramatist whose work seeks to plumb the ineffable nature of being human."^[13] English received the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play in 2022,^[14] the 2022 Obie Award for Best New American Play,^[15] the 2021-22 John Gassner Award (for a new American play, preferably by a new playwright) from the Outer Critics Circle Awards,^[16] and the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for drama.^[17]

• English (2022)^[18]
• Wish You Were Here (2022)^[19][20]

• A League of Their Own (2022)^[21][3]
• Five Women^[21]
• Invitation to a Bonfire^[21]