Born in Tel Aviv, Morani Kornberg spent her life oscillating between the U.S. and the Middle East. She is a writer, performer, scholar, and artist who has had an array of jobs – from volunteering as an EMT to selling tarot cards and crystals at a new age store, from conducting air traffic control to establishing a university writing center. After completing her B.A. in Psychology & English from Tel Aviv University, Morani moved back to the U.S. to obtain her Ph.D. in English from the University at Buffalo’s Poetics Program. Her dissertation research focused on protest poetry, collective memory, and decolonization in Israel-Palestine.
Morani has published widely across genres, including academic articles, poems, translations, and a poetry collection Dear Darwish. She taught literature, writing, and theory at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the University at Buffalo, and Tel Aviv University. She was a member of TAU’s Playback Improv Theater and Buffalo’s Poets Theater. She also participated in Oral Storytelling Shows at the Markaz/Levantine Center and the Writing Pad L.A., where she performed her solo show Letting Go of Zelda. Morani’s television pilot “Obsessed” placed in the Top Ten 2022 GoldenScript TV Competition and was a Quarterfinalist in Screencraft’s 2023 TV Pilot Screenplay Competition. She was recently a fellow in the 2023 1IN4 Writers - Writers Mentorship Program, and previously in RespectAbility’s 2022 Summer Entertainment Lab and the 2022 Women in Film Peer Mentoring Program.
Morani is currently working on multiple projects — spanning from podcasting to television, from printmaking to memoir. Her multi-disciplinary art aims to transform the social imagination, break mental health stigmas, and subvert political, gender, and national divides. Morani believes in decolonial humanism. And magic too. She lives in Los Angeles with her family.