Coming Soon

In the upcoming months...

behind barbed wire, a youth theatre piece about the building of the border wall between mx and the us (May 2009 at Redcat abd Plaza de la Raza).

Panza Monologues DVD, we will be organizing Panza Viewing parties (June 2009)

Finally, a website (April 2009)

blu

Since my thesis production in December blu has been circulating in the world. I recently was notified that it won the Kendeda Award given by Alliance Theatre and I was offered a Jerome fellowship through the Playwrights Center, which means that I will be relocating to Minneapolis in July.

Kennedy Center Latino/a Playwrighting Award

My third year thesis project blu won a kennedy center award! I started writing this piece when I was working in the public schools on the South Side of San Antonio Texas. In the work I was doing, the implications and lasting effects of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) became increasingly clear. Teachers were overworked, underpaid and underappreciated. The presence of school security and their role in maintaining discipline in the schools has increased. Military personnel now have access to student's records under NCLB. These systematic forces are being played out on our youth and will profoundly effect their future. Then there was the reality/implication of neighborhood/family/tradition. Students that were in gangs in many cases were born into them, intergenerational gang members. So the play is an exploration really of all those issues - education, family, tradition, military, violence, institutional oppression - where do we find our place of strength, our place of dignity as a community? Of course, in the play there is no easy resolve, point of solution. It was my way of asking the questions: What do we do? How do become responsible in addressing these issues? I am interested in - what we inherit - what is sacred - what we have lost.

Going to the Kennedy Center was absolutely amazing and I am now in the process of revising blu for my thesis production...more on that soon.

Panza Monologues

Learn more about the Panza Monologues at:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/San-Antonio-TX/THE-PANZA-MONOLOGUES/13733612511?ref=share

rasgos asiaticos

excerpt from rasgos asiaticos published at:
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/frontiers/v024/24.2grise.html

LA Times Article

See the following LA times Article on the Rwanda Project:
http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jan/22/local/me-calarts22

Rwanda Project

For the past two years, The CalArts School of Theatre, Centre Christus in Kigali, Rwanda, and the Interdisciplinary Genocide Studies Group (Berkeley, Kigali) conduct an exchange program that takes as its touchstone the study of the Rwandan genocide of ’94, and investigates means by which art can participate in conflict transformation, the recovery of historical memory, and the building of a civil society.

Each summer, students and working artists travel to Rwanda to visit genocide sites; meet with scholars, theater artists, survivors, government officials, and health care workers; and engage in practical arts-workshops.

In 2007, together with hip-hop artists Sistahailstorm and TIWAEIS, I presented excerpts from a farm for meme, my play about the destruction of a 14 acre urban farm in South Central LA.

Mil Gracias to:
Ronald and Emma Grise, sharon bridgforth, H. Esperanza Garza and Sean Danweber, Sheree Ross, Phillip Avila, Norma Cantu, Herminia Maldonado, Omi Osun Olomo, Dolores Zapata, Barbara Renaud Gonzalez, Rose Palafox and Lu Portillo, Raquel Ruiz, Erik Ehn and the California Institute of Arts for donating to this project.