Early Life
Mansour grew up in a Southern California suburb. Her father was a Lebanese immigrant and her mother was from Seattle, and during the Lebanese Civil War various cousins, uncles, and aunties came to live with the family, bringing global politics directly into the household.4 Those early experiences with displacement and cultural duality would later become defining themes in her playwriting.
She studied acting as an undergraduate. An improvisation course in her senior year redirected her path toward writing and performance, leading her to training at Second City Chicago and eventually to the Groundlings Theatre in Los Angeles.4
Career
Theater
Mansour spent the first part of her professional career in Los Angeles as a performer and writer. She was a member of the Groundlings Sunday Company, performing alongside Ana Gasteyer, Will Ferrell, and others in the company's sketch comedy program.4 That experience gave her a visceral introduction to writing for an audience.
After the September 11, 2001 attacks she relocated to New York City, where she focused on playwriting. She became a member of the Public Theater's Emerging Writers Group and later a Core Writer at the Playwrights' Center.5 She was a resident playwright at New Dramatists (Class of 2020).6 In 2019, she co-founded the theater company SOCIETY with Scott Illingworth and Tim Nicolai.4
Her first solo play, Me and the S.L.A., drew on her childhood obsession with the Patty Hearst kidnapping.4 She went on to write The Vagrant Trilogy, a three-part cycle (Urge for Going, The Hour of Feeling, and The Vagrant) following a Palestinian scholar across decades and continents, which became her most celebrated theatrical work.5 Other produced plays include The Way West, Unseen, We Swim, We Talk, We Go to War, and the musical Beautiful Little Fool, co-written with Hannah Corneau.4 She has also frequently collaborated with British director Mark Wing-Davey.5
She has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Whiting Award (2012),1 the Helen Merrill Award (2020),7 the Kesselring Award (2020), an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters,5 and the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Award for Playwriting (2023).8
Television
Mansour also worked as a television writer. Her early credits include Queens Supreme (CBS, 2003) and Dead Like Me (Showtime, 2003-2004).2 She later joined the writers' room of NBC's medical drama New Amsterdam starting in 2020, advancing from staff writer through co-producer to producer across multiple seasons.2
Extreme Ghostbusters
During her time as a working actress in Los Angeles in the late 1990s, Mansour appeared as a guest voice actor on Extreme Ghostbusters.2 She performed in the episode "Grease," which aired on September 25, 1997.3 The episode centers on a gremlin wreaking havoc on New York City's communications, transportation, and power infrastructure, and involves the Ghostbusters being arrested and placed on a plane for a final confrontation with the creature. Mansour's guest role was one of several acting credits she accumulated during her Groundlings-era career in Los Angeles before her move to New York.
References
Some content on this page was researched using the Ghostbusters Wiki on Fandom.
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Whiting Foundation, "Mona Mansour" (2012 Whiting Award in Drama), https://www.whiting.org/awards/winners/mona-mansour, accessed 2026-06-13.
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IMDb, "Mona Mansour (nm0543967)," https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0543967/, accessed 2026-06-13.
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IMDb, "Grease," Extreme Ghostbusters (September 25, 1997), https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0574528/, accessed 2026-06-13.
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Mansour, Mona. "Bio," monamansour.com, https://www.monamansour.com/bio, accessed 2026-06-13.
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"Mona Mansour," Wikipedia, accessed 2026-06-13, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Mansour.
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"Mona Mansour," New Dramatists, https://newdramatists.org/mona-mansour, accessed 2026-06-13.
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"Six Talented Playwrights Win $25,000 Helen Merrill Awards," New York Community Trust (June 17, 2020), https://www.monamansour.com/news/2020/6/17/helenmerrillaward, accessed 2026-06-13.
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Playbill, "Martyna Majok, Mona Mansour Win 2023 Steinberg Playwright Awards" (2023), https://playbill.com/article/martyna-majok-mona-mansour-win-2023-steinberg-playwright-awards, accessed 2026-06-13.
