Playwriting and Directing and Expanding Approaches to American Arts Welcomes Virginia Grise

Texas Theatre and Dance is pleased to announce Virginia Grise will be joining the department in the Fall of 2024 as an Assistant Professor in Playwriting and Directing and Expanding Approaches to American Arts at the College of Fine Arts. 

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).  From panzas to prisons, from street theatre to large scale multimedia performances, from princess to chafa, her interdisciplinary body of work as a writer, performer, director and creative producer includes dance theatre, performance installations, guerilla theatre, site specific interventions, community gatherings and plays set in bars without windows, barrio rooftops and lesbian bedrooms.

“Returning to campus as a professor is an exquisite homecoming,” shares Grise, who graduated from The University of Texas at Austin. “Not only am I a graduate of The University of Texas at Austin, I also became an artist in Austin through innovative programs for artists, organizers and scholars, gathering spaces for artistic craft and rigor, like The Austin Project, produced by Omi Osun Joni L. Jones (Professor Emerita of African and African Diaspora Studies). I look forward to rooting my practice and my teaching in Texas, giving back to the place that so generously raised me a curious and creative thinker.”

She is a founding member of a todo dar productions, 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.

“I am thrilled to welcome Virginia Grise to the department,” shares department chair Dr. Peter Carpenter. “Her work is politically urgent, rooted in community and artistically adventurous. I am confident she will bring exciting ideas and energy to our community, and I’m genuinely grateful to be working with her.”

Grise 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. She holds an M.F.A. in Writing for Performance from the California Institute of the Arts.