Abi Zakarian

Abi Zakarian is an award-winning British-Armenian playwright born and raised in Derby, now based in London. Her plays include: Welfare, Derby Theatre; Age is Revolting, for The National Theatre Connections Festival; We Are Our Mountains, for Bush Theatre Protest Series; Lullaby, Shakespeare’s Globe; Found, produced by 45North for their Written on the Waves series of audio plays; Perfect Myth Allegory at Jermyn Street Theatre for the ‘15 Heroines’ series; Enough, Small Truth Theatre; Fabric, Underbelly & Soho Theatre, UK tour;  A Threshold, BritSchool/Bridge Foundation musical; Old Dough/When Two Armenians Meet, Futures Theatre for their Fully Amplified podcast series; A Thousand Yards at Southwark Playhouse and I Am Karyan Ophidian for the Sam Wanamaker Theatre at Shakespeare’s Globe. 

Her play Fabric won a Scotsman Fringe First award and she won the Vault Festival Peoples Choice Award for I Have A Mouth And I Will Scream. She is a previous recipient of an MGCFutures Award bursary.

Her plays Mountain Warfare & Worthy Women were finalist & long-listed for the Women’s Prize for Playwriting in 2021/22 & 2023/24 respectively.

Abi is a co-founder of the horror theatre company Terrifying Women along with Morgan Lloyd Malcolm and Sampiria Al-Fihri. She also created and co-runs the Armenian Creatives Network UK. 

An international production of her play Fabric (as Hilos) is currently running in Mexico City.

She is co-creator and writer of Finding Large Monuments to be Destroyed, a new immersive theatre show which begins a UK tour in 2026. Her first short film, Pomegranate, is currently on the festival circuit while her second short, MEAT, is currently being edited. Abi is also writing two new musicals with composer Ruth Chan and is developing several feature film and television scripts.