Masi Asare

Masi Asare is a composer/lyricist, playwright, voice teacher, and performance scholar. Her shows include: Monsoon Wedding (lyrics), the new stage adaptation of Mira Nair’s film; The Family Resemblance (book/music/lyrics/Theatre Royal Stratford East commission, Eugene O’Neill Center NMTC); Rishvor, a new musical about racial passing (book/music/lyrics) commissioned by Barbara Whitman/Grove Entertainment; Mirror of Most Value: A Ms. Marvel Play (Samuel French/ Concord/ Marvel), a play about super hero Kamala Khan; the mega-musical Paradise Square (co-lyricist) about race relations in 1863; a new musical commissioned by Victory Gardens Theatre and the Toulmin Foundation; and the secret agent musical Sympathy Jones (music/lyrics/concept; NYMF; Playscripts). Collectively, her shows have received over 115 productions to date internationally.

Nominated for a Tony Award® for her work on Paradise Square (Best Score), Masi is a past Dramatists Guild Fellow and received the first-ever Billie Burke Ziegfeld Award for a woman composer of musicals, mentored by Jeanine Tesori and Daryl Roth. She has also received both the Holof Lyricist Award and the Haupt Composition Prize from the O’Neill Center; an Emerging Artist Grant from the Theater Hall of Fame; and the Stacey Mindich “Go Write A Musical” Lilly Award.  In 2021, she was named on the “Women to Watch on Broadway” list from Broadway Women’s Fund. Her songs have been heard at venues across New York City from Playwrights Horizons to Lincoln Center. A voice instructor and coach with over two decades of teaching experience, Masi specializes in popular vocal styles. Her voice students have performed in regional and touring shows, and on Broadway. Masi’s scholarly book project, Voicing the Possible: Technique, Vocal Sound, and Black Women on the Musical Stage (forthcoming Duke University Press), examines the impact of blues singers on Broadway belting and makes the case for the need to feel the racial history in contemporary practices of musical theatre performance.

Masi holds a bachelor’s degree magna cum laude from Harvard and a PhD in performance studies from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She is a member of ASCAP and the Dramatists Guild, a mentor with the American Theatre Wing/National Endowment for the Arts Songwriting Challenge, and serves on the membership committee of ASTR, the nominating committee of the Dramatists Guild, and the advisory board of MAESTRA. She divides her time between Chicago and New York City.