Mounir Maasri

Mounir Rachid Maasri (born. Aley, Lebanon; April 23, 1940) (Arabic: منير رشيد معاصر‎), born to Rachid Maasri and Shafiqa Haddad, is an actor, director, writer, and teacher for the Performing Arts. Maasri completed his early education in Lebanon, and travelled to the United States at a young age to continue his studies in the field of Performing Arts.

Perhaps one of the biggest roles he has ever played – and continues to do so – is his role as a teacher. Maasri has taught at several different Lebanese universities, such as the American University of Beirut (Off-Campus Program), ALBA, Notre-Dame, Saint-Esprit de Kaslik, and Balamand, as well as Dulcina College for the Performing Arts in Brasília, Brazil. He worked as an acting coach on Brazilian feature film Baile Perfumado (winner of 18 international awards). Since 1998, he has been Dean of the Performing Arts School at the Institute Libano-European of Technology, as well the sole instructor of an intensive, multi-faceted program which trains and teaches students in the four interlinked disciplines of acting, directing, writing and producing for cinema and television. Many of his former students, who have nothing but praise for him (and in true technological generation fashion have set up a group on the social networking site Facebook, which currently has over 100 members), have pursued successful budding careers of their own in Lebanon, the Gulf, Saudi Arabia, Belgium and France, among other places. He also developed a program for teaching the audiovisual arts to children with special needs, and is backed by a diploma in Parental Guidance: The Development of the Human Potential from The Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential, Philadelphia – USA. He initially implemented the program at the Institute Libano-European of Technology but was unfortunately unable to continue due to lack of funding.