Saudi actress and screenwriter Summer Shesha is part of the latest generation of young artists that have impacted Saudi Arabia’s art scene and pioneered several innovative developments in Saudi cinema.
Summer has worked on 5 feature films, 3 of them are in post-production now, 4 short films. Her recent achievement was on her role in the feature film KAYAN , which was directed by Hakeem Jomah and world premiered at the 2021 Red Sea International Film Festival, and competed in the 8th edition of the Saudi Films Festival where Summer was awarded the Golden Palm Award for Best Actress on her role.
Shesha made her acting debut with Mahmoud Sabbagh in a 2013 web series titled KASH. After that, in 2017, she landed her first leading role in a feature film in Khaled Nadershah’s EXIT 5, which featured in several festivals and collected a myriad of awards prior to Saudi Arabia’s cinematic renaissance.
Choosing to diversify her portfolio with some television roles, Summer then starred in Ali Alsumayin’s BASHAR 1 in 2017 and Faris Godus’s ANOTHER PLANET in 2019. Shesha starred in the 2022 comedy-drama series JAMEEL JEDDAN, a shahid original and she is expecting the release of other TV shows within the coming 2 years.
Adding to her growing list of accomplishments, Shesha — along with three other Arab writers — received a grant from Netflix Middle East’s Grow Creative Initiative after completing her TV series development program with the Middle East Media Initiative (MEMI).
Shesha’s passion for art began at a young age, when she began acting in school plays and family events, eventually joining underground theater groups and independent films, all with the shared passion of making art, even if there were no platforms to showcase these works at the time, Dabbling in everything from acting, writing, Shesha has an insatiable enthusiasm for the performing arts and human nature and then ventured further into cinema, television, and street theater.
Initially starting a career in finance, Shesha used to juggle a 9 to 5 job with her passion for acting until the beginning of 2022, when she decided to leave her desk job behind and pursue the abundance of acting opportunities she has been afforded full-time, to live the full artistic experience with all it’s ups, downs and uncertainty.
Shesha believes that Saudi Arabia has a lot of diverse, unique, and astonishing stories to tell — especially those pertaining to Saudi women —, stories that are unknown to the world, and she aspires to present these stories to the world in the hopes that she will inspire the same sense of awe that comes from digging deeper into human stories and emotions, which she perfectly exhibits in her acting and writing, and hopefully directing in the near future.
