Milta Ortiz is a bilingual, bicultural playwright, poet, and performer.
Born in El Salvador, Ortiz emigrated to the United States during childhood and settled with her family in Northern California. [1] She earned her MFA from Northwestern University's Writing for the Screen & Stage program and a Creative Writing BA from San Francisco State University. [2] Ortiz has taught creative writing to young adults and screenwriting to undergraduates at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. [3] In addition, she has taught theatre at Pima Community College. While continuing to write plays, Ortiz is a board member for National New Play Network. She is the Associate Artistic Director at Borderlands Theater in Tucson, AZ.
"Good food should not be for a select few. It should be affordable and accessible to all. It’s food justice. I’m very interested in that. Food is making us sick. So many Latinos and African Americans have diabetes and at younger and younger ages". [5]
Ortiz has been published in City of Stairways: A Poet's Field Guide to San Francisco [6] ), Teaching Artist Journal, and has created a self-published chapbook, Encantadas with Las Manas Tres. [7] Mirrors, written by Ortiz and published by the Teaching Artist Journal in 2011, explores what it was like for Ortiz to go from learning English just six months after emigrating to the United States at eight-years-old, to then go on to teach English as a second language to recently arrived immigrants. [8] As Ortiz stated:
"I had to go back to that place, that feeling of being new and inside out, I had moved so far away from. Every class was a learning experience for me. Every class triggered a different memory". [8]
Milta Ortiz is mother to a creative daughter. She currently lives in Tucson, Arizona and is the Marketing and Outreach Director for Borderlands Theatre Company. [3] Her husband is Marc David Pinate, the Producing Artistic Director at Borderlands. [11] They co-founded the Hybrid Performance Experience (HyPE), which is a theater troupe that performs at public spaces throughout California's Bay Area. [3]
Luis Miguel Valdez is an American playwright, screenwriter, film director and actor. Regarded as the father of Chicano film and playwriting, Valdez is best known for his play Zoot Suit, his movie La Bamba, and his creation of El Teatro Campesino. A pioneer in the Chicano Movement, Valdez broadened the scope of theatre and arts of the Chicano community.
Carlos Lacámara is a Cuban-born American actor and playwright who has had a long career on American television, making his first appearance in 1983 on the sitcom Family Ties and mostly played in roles as Paco Ortíz on the sitcom Nurses, and as Ray García, the family patriarch on The Brothers García.
Lydia R. Diamond is an American playwright and professor. Among her most popular plays are The Bluest Eye (2007), an adaptation of Toni Morrison's novel; Stick Fly (2008); Harriet Jacobs (2011); and Smart People (2016). Her plays have received national attention and acclaim, receiving the Lorraine Hansberry Award for Best Writing, an LA Weekly Theater Award, a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award and the 2020 Horton Foote Playwriting Award from the Dramatists Guild of America.
Eduardo Oscar Machado is a Cuban playwright living in the United States. Notable plays by Machado include Broken Eggs, Havana is Waiting and The Cook. Many of his plays are autobiographical or deal with Cuba in some way. Machado teaches playwriting at New York University. He has served as the artistic director of the INTAR Theatre in New York City since 2004. He is openly gay.
Diane Rodriguez was an American theatre artist who directed, wrote and performed. An OBIE Award winning actress, she was known for using comedy to confront various forms of oppression, often with special attention to issues of gender and sexuality.
Ismail Khalidi is a Palestinian/Lebanese American playwright, screenwriter and theater director whose work tackles the history of Palestine and the modern Middle East, as well as wider themes of race, colonialism, displacement and war. He is best known for the plays Tennis in Nablus (2010) and Truth Serum Blues (2005) and the critically-acclaimedReturning to Haifa, which premiered in London in 2018. Tennis in Nablus received two graduate student Kennedy Center Honors in 2008 while he was still at NYU, the Mark Twain Comedy Playwriting Award and the Quest for Peace Playwriting Award. Since then his plays have been produced and presented internationally and published in half a dozen anthologies.
Toni Press-Coffman is an American playwright, living and working in Tucson, Arizona. She was born and raised in New York City.
Lila Rose Kaplan is a 21st-century American playwright. She currently lives in Somerville, MA, where she was a Huntington Playwriting Fellow with the Huntington Theatre Company (2012-2014) as well as a Next Voices Playwriting Fellow with New Repertory Theatre (2015-2016).
Aravind Enrique Adyanthaya is a Puerto Rican writer, performer, and theater director. He is the founding artistic director of Casa Cruz de la Luna, an experimental theater company and cultural center established in 1998 that was based in a former residence and commercial space in the historical district of San Germán, Puerto Rico until 2022. Through Casa Cruz de la Luna, he has directed innovative productions of works by Federico García Lorca, Miguel de Cervantes, and Puerto Rican writer Pepe Liboy.
Denise Uyehara is an American performance artist, director and writer. Her interdisciplinary and solo performances and installations examine and explore memory, time-travel, immigration, race, sexuality, and gender. She is the founding member of the performance group Sacred Naked Nature Girls, a group of four women of different ethnicities and sexual orientation, who use their bodies as a means to construct identities and inspire dialogue. Her work is internationally recognized and has been featured in exhibitions in Los Angeles, Helsinki, London, Tokyo, and Vancouver. She is also the author of two full-length plays, Hobbies and Hiro. Uyehara is a fellow of the Asian Cultural Council.
Martín Zimmerman is an American bilingual playwright.
Migdalia Cruz is a writer of plays, musical theatre and opera in the U.S. and has been translated into Spanish, French, Arabic, Greek, and Turkish.
Karen Zacarías is an American playwright. She is known for her play Mariela in the Desert. It was the winner of the National Latino Playwriting Award and a finalist for other prizes. Mariela in the Desert was debuted at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. Zacarías is the founder of the Young Playwrights' Theater located in Washington, D.C.
Magdalena Gómez (1953-) is an American playwright, poet, social activist, motivational speaker, and performer. She lives in Springfield, Massachusetts where she is the artistic director of Teatro V!da, the city's first Latin@ theatre, and served as the city's second Poet Laureate. Gómez has worked with young people through the arts for nearly forty years and focuses much of her work on intergenerational collaboration.
Virginia Grise is a playwright, and director. Grise's most recognized work is blu, the winner of the 2010 Yale Drama Series Award and a finalist for the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts' Latino/a Playwrighting Award. In addition, Grise is the co-writer of The Panza Monologues with Irma Mayorga, and edited a volume of Zapatista communiqués called Conversations with Don Durito. She is also a recipient of the Whiting Writers' Award and the Princess Grace Award in Theater Directing.
Tanya Selene Saracho is a Mexican-American actress, playwright, dramaturge and screenwriter. With a background in theater before writing for television, she co-founded Teatro Luna in 2000 and was its co-artistic director for ten years. She also co-founded the Alliance of Latinx Theater Artists (ALTA) of Chicago. She is particularly known for centering the "Latina gaze". She developed and was showrunner of the Starz series Vida, which ran for three seasons (2018-2020). Saracho signed a three-year development deal with Starz in February 2018.
Beto O'Byrne is a multiethnic playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He has written 14 full-length plays which been produced in major cities including New York City, Austin, San Antonio, and Los Angeles. He has been nominated for numerous awards and has participated in playwright festivals across the United States. He is perhaps best known for founding the multiethnic theater collective Radical Evolution.
The Latinx Theatre Commons (LTC) is a national movement launched in 2012, which promotes Latino equity in American theater through convening, scholarship, advocacy, and art. The goals, activities, and methods of its actions are determined, championed, and carried out by the LTC's volunteer, self-organized steering committee of predominantly U.S.-based theater-makers and scholars of Latino theater, working together and with community partners around the country. The LTC was founded by eight well-known Latino playwrights, directors, and scholars, led by Karen Zacarias, who was hailed by American Theater Magazine as one of the most produced playwrights in the United States and who was named as a United States Artists Fellow in 2021. The group included Antonio Sonera, Kristoffer Diaz, Anne García-Romero, Lisa Portes, Tlaloc Rivas, Jose Luis Valenzuela, and Enrique Urueta. Abigail Vega served as the first LTC producer from 2014-2019. Beginning in May 2019, Armando Huipe succeeded Vega as the LTC Producer. Beginning in June 2021, Jacqueline Flores succeeded Huipe as the LTC Producer.
Carlos Murillo is an American playwright, director, and professor of Puerto Rican and Colombian descent. Based in Chicago, Murillo is a professor and head of the Playwriting program at the Theatre School at DePaul University. He is best known for his play Dark Play or Stories for Boys.
Juliette Carrillo is an American theatre director, playwright, and filmmaker. She has directed plays and musicals at the Denver Theater Center, Yale Repertory Theater, South Coast Repertory, Mark Taper Forum, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Seattle Repertory Theatre, the Magic Theatre, Alliance Theatre, Arizona Theater Company, and the Actor's Theatre of Louisville.
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