Assistant Professor, Playwriting/Directing Expanding Approaches to American Arts
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 and The Panza Monologues (co-written with Irma Mayorga). 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. 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. 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 a M.F.A. in Writing for Performance from the California Institute of the Arts.
What do you enjoy most about being a part of UT Theatre and Dance?
Collaboration. Imagination. Possibility.
What is your favorite thing about Austin?
The 90s.
Writing for Performance, Performance by Design, Site Responsive Performance, Feminist Theatre and Performance, Cultural Studies, Artistic Agency and Vision
Books
Mestiza Power by Conchi Leon Mora, in translation by Virginia Grise. New York, New York: No Passport Press, 2018.
Your Healing is Killing Me. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Plays Inverse Press, 2017.
The Panza Monologues. Second Edition, (co-written with Irma Mayorga), Austin, Texas: The University of Texas Press, 2014.
blu. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2011.
Anthologies
Contributor, “rasgos asiáticos” The Massachusetts Review, Volume 65, Number 1, Massachusetts Review, 2024.
Contributor, “a farm for meme,” Mujeres de Maiz en Movimiento, ed. Amber Rose Gonzalez, Felicia Montes, Nadia Zepeda, University of Arizona Press, 2024.
Contributor, “Despite the Flames,” Troubling Traditions: Canonicity, Theatre, and Performance in the US. ed. Lindsey Mantoan, Matthew Moore & Angela Farr Schiller, Rodriguez, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2022.
Contributor, “Llamado de Nopal,” Theater Journal Vol. 49: N. 1, ed. Tom Seller & Chantal Rodriguez, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2019.
Contributor, Prison Nation, ed. Nicole Fleetwood, New York, New York: Aperture Magazine #230, 2018.
Contributor, “Siempre Norteada,” Theatre and Cartographies of Power: Repositioning the Latino/a Americas, ed. Analola Santana & Jimmy Noriega, Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois Press, 2018.
Contributor, “International Panza,” Monologues for Latino/a Actors, ed. Micha Espinosa, Hanover, New Hampshire: Smith & Kraus, 2014.
Contributor, “pineapple/full moon offerings for my nephew,” Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academics and the Austin Project, Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 2010.
Editorial Collective, Conversations with Don Durito: The Story of Durito and the Defeat of Neo-Liberalism, New York, New York: Autonomedia Press, 2005.
Contributor, rasgos asiaticos. “Gender on the Borderlands” Frontiers: Journal of Women Studies Vol. 24: N. 2 & 3, ed. Castañeda: University of Nebraska Press, 2004.
Contributor, Voices for Racial Justice, ed. bridgforth & Margulies, Austin, Texas: Evelyn Street Press, 2004.
Performances
Riding the Currents of the Wilding Wind, a theatrical concert based on Helena Maria Viramontes’ Their Dogs Came with Them
- Magic Theatre, directed by Kendra Ware, San Francisco, California, 2024.
- MACLA, directed by Kendra Ware, San Jose, California, 2024.
- Pregones/Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre, directed by Kendra Ware, Bronx, New York, 2024.
- Las Maestras Center for Xicanx/Indigenous Thought, Art and Social Praxis at UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, 2024.
- Cornell University (part of the Lest Silence be Destructive Conference), directed by Kendra Ware, Ithaca, New York, 2023.
rasgos asiáticos
- Automata, Los Angeles, California, 2024.
- DiverseWorks, Houston, Texas, 2022.
a farm for meme
- Howlround TV, directed by Elena Araoz, produced in collaboration with allgo, a todo dar, Cara Mía Theatre, Innovations in Socially Distant Performance (a research group housed at Princeton University), 2020.
- Radio Play, directed by Rebecca Rivas, 2020.
Your Healing is Killing Me
- Cara Mía Theatre, directed by Kendra Ware, Dallas, Texas, 2019.
- PlayMakers Repertory Company, directed by Misha Chowdhury, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 2019.
- JACK, directed by Emily Mendelsohn, Brooklyn, New York, 2017.
Their Dogs Came with Them (adaptation of the novel by Helena Maria Viramontes)
- Borderlands Theater, directed by Kendra Ware, Tucson, Arizona, 2019.
- Perryville Women’s Prison, directed by Virginia Grise, Perryville, Arizona, 2019.
- Staged Reading, Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference, San Antonio, Texas, 2020.
how do you pull your own sadness up out of the ground?
- Site-specific collaboration with Rafa Esparza and Joe Jimenez, Commissioned for the Luminaria Art Festival, San Antonio, Texas, 2015.
blu (winner of 2010 Yale Drama Series Award)
- Cara Mía Theatre, directed by Rene Moreno, Dallas, Texas, 2015.
- Weekend Theatre, directed by Ryan Whitfield, Little Rock, Arkansas, 2014.
- Company of Angels, directed by Laurie Carlos, Los Angeles, California, 2011.
Performance Lectures
Riding the Currents of the Wilding Wind
- Kieve Distinguished Lecture Series, Stanford University, 2024.
- REDCAT, Los Angeles, California, 2022.
- Texas Performing Arts, Austin, Texas, 2022.
These Are My Papers
- ArtChangeUS, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California, 2020.
- Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston, Houston, Texas, 2019.
- Madrid Lecture & Symposium, Chicana Teatristas Past & Present, Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas, 2019.
Contact Information
Email address
virginia.
Website
a todo dar
Campus location
WIN 2.162