ben moorad

Ben has created and performed eight story-based shows with Hand2Mouth Theatre; The Portland Mercury called the last round of them “haunting and lyrical” and said they “just might save a life.” These shows came out of his long-term interdisciplinary study of the will to die and the will to live called The Envelope of Suicides. He’s a MacDowell Fellow, and he’s received four grants from the Regional Arts + Culture Council to produce performances of his work. 

His work has been published in The Threepenny ReviewThe Buckman Journal, Poems & Plays, The Sunday Oregonian and other periodicals. His long poem “The Gates of Paradise” was included in Nowhere Lands: Exploring Utopian and Dystopian Voices, a 2025 anthology from Chemeketa Press. Ben co-wrote (with Lora Lafayette) a play about her life that New Room Studios produced in 2023 at New Expressive Works in Portland.

He’s the Co-Producer of We Are the Ones Who Live Here, an English-language podcast of stories of life in Lebanon, as told by Lebanese artists and journalists in their 20s. He’s also the Creative Producer of Sketch + Release, MOsley WOtta’s forthcoming series of lyrical documentaries about Black artists in rural Oregon.