Nazli Tabatabai-Khatambakhsh

Nazli Tabatabai-Khatambakhsh BSc. Hons, MLitt, MA, SFHEA is a multi-award-winning international leader and collaborator working across artistic disciplines and contexts in opera, theatre, dance, visual arts, film and performance poetry. Her credits include Royal Ballet and Opera, Welsh National Opera, Birmingham Opera, Britten Pears and Aldeburgh Festival, Oxford Song, Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Atmosphere Festival, Tete a Tete, National Theatre of Scotland, Traverse Theatre, Bush Theatre and City Theater Tehran. 

At the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, she is Professor of Dramatic Writing on the MA in Opera Making & Writing, and she is the inaugural practice-based Post Graduate Researcher in Libretto. She is the inaugural Associate Artist at the Oxford School of Drama and is an External Examiner for the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. 

Her work as a coach, mentor and facilitator spans Clore Leadership, IETM and Edinburgh Performing Arts Development. For the International Society of Performing Arts (ISPA), based in New York, of which she is an Arts Council England Grad Fellow, she serves as a member of the Governance Committee.

Her ever-evolving portfolio of new work and reinterpretations of existing work is infused by her country of birth, Iran, and is interwoven by the cultures she reconnects with locally across the UK and internationally across continents.

Updated September 2025