virginia grise

bio

Virginia Grise is a recipient of the Alpert Award in the Arts, Yale Drama Award, Whiting Writers’ Award, and the Princess Grace Award in Theatre Directing. Her published work includes Your Healing is Killing Me (Plays Inverse Press), blu (Yale University Press, The Panza  Monologues co-written with Irma Mayorga (University of Texas Press) and an edited volume of Zapatista communiqués titled Conversations with Don Durito (Autonomedia Press).

She is an alumna of the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, the Women’s Project Theatre Lab & the NALAC Leadership Institute. Grise has been a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, a Matakyev Research Fellow at the Center for the Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University, a Jerome Fellow at the Playwright’s Center, and a Herberger Institute Projecting All Voices Fellow at Arizona State University.

Currently, she is the Mellon Foundation Playwright in Residence at Cara Mía Theatre. She holds an MFA in Writing for Performance from the California Institute of the Arts.

Virginia Grise is a founding member of a todo dar productions. a todo dar productions stages public interventions and builds convivial spaces for and with community to study, think, imagine, create and dream together. To date, a todo dar has produced theatre in public plazas and parks, a women’s prison, under the freeway, in cargo boxes, in a rice silo, and virtually. Ongoing projects—talleres for dreaming and fugitive libraries—include a sobremesa series, encuentros, consultas, artist exchanges and intercambios.

“As an artist, I want to build spaces for collective dreaming, for ambitious work that is transformative, that incites movement, that demands that we listen to ourselves and to each other.”

— Virginia Grise

body of work

From panzas to prisons, from street theatre to large scale multimedia performances, from princess to chafa, Virginia Grise’s interdisciplinary body of work as a writer, performer, director and creative producer includes dance theater, performance installations, guerilla theater, site specific interventions, community gatherings, plays and books.

  • Performance Installations

    rasgos asiáticos, Remember el Alma, i was born here, how do you pull your own sadness up out the ground?

  • Performance Lectures

    Riding the Currents of the Wilding Wind, These are My Papers, A Place at the Table, Theatre of the Rowdy, An Artist Talks

  • Multimedia Performance

    Riding the Currents of the Wilding Wind, Soñar es luchar

  • Plays

    Their Dogs Came with Them, a farm for meme, blu, Siempre Norteada, behind barbed wire

  • Teatro Callejero

    Ahogar, La Gloria, PGA NO!, poema a mi querido San Anto, Agua es Vida, La Criada Malcriada, Candida Vendida

  • Community Gatherings

    Read In & Mitote, Puesto de Palabras, Casa Chueca, Nada de esto es un sueño, Summer Dreaming en el Parque, Spring Equinox, Books in the Barrio Protest & Rally

  • Dance Theatre

    Passions, Held by Dreams, would i then be…

  • Short Plays

    Luv Offerings for Elijah, Her Love is a Garden, Revolution, Pulse. Imagine the Impossible, Racism’s Chokehold, 100 women are on strike because they are hungry, Teatro Organico, flower offerings for lil girls that ride buses, Right to Remain, Call to Prayer, ESL, Sha-Hell-No!, corn does not grow in the museum, woman in the walnut tree turned butterfly, death sounds like…

  • Solo Performance

    Your Healing is Killing Me, The Panza Monologues

  • Books

    Your Healing is Killing Me, blu, The Panza Monologues

teaching

Virginia Grise has been invited to talk about her art and art practice at over 50 universities across the nation. She has taught writing for performance at the university level, as a public school teacher, in community centers, women’s prisons and in the juvenile correction system. Currently she is an Assistant Professor in Playwriting and Directing and Expanding Approaches to American Arts at the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.

“Her drama probes drama, her poetry troubles poetry, she makes the spirit-fueled, terrible leap from self to other and is the cause and creature of community. She converts craft to kinship, wish to mandate, verse to plan of action.”

— The 2022 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts Panel