Saleem (playwright)
American playwright
Saleem (Saleem Azzouqa) is a Palestinian-American gay Muslim playwright, actor, DJ, and dancer.
Biography
Saleem was born and raised in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, finished college in Dhahran (graduating in business in 1984), moved to the United States in 1985. There he earned an MBA at Colorado State University, and he has since lived in Los Angeles and San Francisco, California, in the United States.
Saleem was the recipient of a 1996 GLAAD Harvey Fierstein Award for Best Original Writing for his semi-autobiographical play Salam Shalom: A Tale Of Passion, a two-act love story. As a dancer, Saleem developed his own style which incorporates belly dancing, gypsy movements, flamenco and jazz to produce what he calls "free style belly dancing".
In 2010, referring to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, he said: "I think things will change and will change for the worse.
“Saleem (playwright)” enters the record as american playwright. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Saleem, playwright and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7403836. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1984, 1985, 1996 and 2010.
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This entry incorporates text from “Saleem (playwright)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.