Banna Desta is a playwright and screenwriter based in New York City. She is recent MFA graduate in Dramatic Writing at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. At NYU she was awarded the John Golden Prize for excellence in playwriting and was a finalist for the Goldberg Prize. She is a winner of the 2017 National MFA Playwrights Festival. Her short play, Pining, received a professional Equity production at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater and was published in the Samuel French annual anthology in 2019. She assistant directed the 2018 production of the Pulitzer-finalist play, “Thom Pain: based on nothing” at the Signature Theater in New York City. She is the co-creator of the webseries, Youth, etc. called "The Best New Webseries" by the Guardian in 2018. More recently, she wrote and produced the short film, “Akinyi + Yvonne” which was the 2019 selection for the Vail Film Festival and CR8:BLK Film Festival. She is a 2019 Marcie Bloom Fellow in Film. She was a finalist for the Van Lier New Voices Fellowship and the Fulbright, Creative & Performing Arts Fellow in 2019. In the past, she has worked in the television and media landscape for U.S. News &World Report, the Washington Post and Nickelodeon. She is currently assisting on the upcoming FOX television series, “Filthy Rich”