Pakistan, 30

Individual applicant

Saad is a comedian and a writer. He created Pakistan’s first improvisational theatre group, Blackfish, who performed in Contact Theatre’s Contacting the World in 2004. More recently Saad embarked on Pakistan’s first English language comedy tour entitled Saad Haroon: Very Live!. The tour was filmed and aired as a successful television show. Saad still performs standup regularly at Open Mic Night, a forum he initiated in 2006 to provide a platform for emerging performance artists. Saad is also the creator, host and writer of Pakistan’s first English language comedy show, The Real News, which is now showing its second season. Saad recently wrote part of the radio play Bora Bistra which was aired on BBC Radio 4. He was also selected as a writer to take part in the World Wide Jam, a new initiative developed by Contact, which will be featured in a BBC festival in November.