Heather Raffo (born in Michigan, United States) is a Lucille Lortel Award-winning Assyrian American playwright and actress, best known for her leading role in the one-woman play 9 Parts of Desire. Biography Early life Her father is Assyrian and a civil engineer and her mother is American, who are both of Christian faith. Heather is a Roman Catholic who grew up in Okemos, Michigan. Heather holds a BA from the University of Michigan, an MFA from the University of San Diego and she also studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Having been born in the United States, she and her family visited Iraq in 1974 when she was a little girl and again in 1993. Raffo credits Ntozake Shange as her most significant artistic influence and has noted her as an inspiration to writing her own work after reading For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf. Career Heather Raffo is most famous for her notable role in the one-woman play 9 Parts of Desire. The play focuses on the lives of women in her father's homeland, and was originally conceived in 1993 after a visit to her Iraqi relatives. It was also inspired by Raffo's trip to the Saddam Art Centre in Baghdad where she saw only billboard sized portraits of Saddam Hussein. Later, in a back room, she saw a painting of a nude woman clinging to a barren tree. She took a photo of the painting, returned to America and devised a way of replicating the painting into a play. A decade later she completed the play, which features monologues by nine highly distinct Iraqi women, all played by herself. When asked about 9 Parts of Desire, she comments "I'd love to hear an American say, 'That Bedouin woman is just like my aunt.' But at the same time, I want American audiences to walk out a little confused, not able to say, 'Oh, I get it,' but rather to understand how difficult it is to grasp the psyche of people who have lived under Saddam for 30 years with American support, then had a war with Iran, resulting in 1.5 million deaths, followed by 13 years of sanctions and two wars under American firepower." The response to the play drew much media attention to Heather, as she has given numerous public appearances and interviews on American television shows.