Hi! I’m Laila, an outdoorsy, food-obsessed, pop music fan, compulsive reader (seriously, it’s bad), and try-everything-but-skydiving-’cause-that’s-crazy enthusiast. I may be a CW teenager to the industry ready to burst out on Freeform, but to my three little girls, I’m Mommy.

My mom grew up in Lebanon and my dad grew up in Syria, making me 100% first-generation Arab. After growing up in Cornfield Country, Illinois, USA, I spent five years in Los Angeles falling in love with sitcoms, improv, and indie filmmaking. Now that I live in the wilds of New Hampshire (y’all, there’s no Trader Joe’s here), I wear a lot of Patagonia and can be found walking to the park or having a BBQ because I now have space for a grill. (WILD.)

Multi-hyphenate life means I have had the opportunity to stretch into different mediums: theater, improv, sitcom, drama, dramedy, voice acting, and radio plays. Throughout these mediums, my guiding star has been the intersectionality of my identity and the joy, humanity, and wonder being an Arab American woman can bring.

I have produced work through Free Pizza Productions, a diversity-focused storytelling production company I co-founded. Our work highlights our cringingly relatable millennial experiences while much of my individual work focuses on the ridiculousness of society’s (mixed) expectations.

Being a writer lets me create the world as it could be. I believe art is a dialogue. I believe art is opportunity. I believe art is activism. I write for my girls and I write for me.