Yusra Warsama
Yusra Warsama is a British playwright, theatre director, and stage, film and television actress.
Early and personal life
Warsama was born in the United Arab Emirates to a Somali Islamic family displaced by the civil war in the country. As a young child her family moved from Abu Dhabi to England. She has a younger sister. She studied for a degree in criminology and sociology. She became a mother living in Manchester in her early twenties.Career
Stage
She became involved with the Contact Theatre in Manchester whilst a student. In 2015, she appeared at the Donmar Warehouse in James Graham's play The Vote, appearing alongside Judi Dench, amongst others. That year, a play she wrote based on female experience of genital mutilation, Rites, toured Great Britain.In 2023, she wrote and directed Of All the Beautiful Things in the World a free-form adaptation of Federico García Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba which moved the setting from 20th century Andalusia, Spain to 21st century Moss Side in Manchester.
She was a writer on the triple-bill of short plays Everywhere with her short play Gestation; the plays united in their exploration of similar socio-political themes such as race and class, as well as gender-based prejudice and discrimination, and toured in 2025.
Film and television
She could be seen in Call the Midwife on BBC One in 2017, playing a Somali woman who underwent a traumatic childbirth after suffering genital mutilation as a child. In 2019, she joined the cast for the second series of the Stephen King supernatural horror adaptation Castle Rock.She appeared in Shane Meadows historical drama The Gallows Pole. She could be seen in Swedish drama series Deliver Me on Netflix.
In 2025, she had a leading role in Nadia Fall's film Brides, which premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. In January 2026, she could be seen in the Amazon Prime Video crime thriller Steal alongside Sophie Turner.