Elaine Romero

Playwright / Dramaturg, Barrio Stories in Barrio Viejo

Award-winning playwright Elaine Romero has won the Edgerton Fund for New American Plays, Toronto’s InspiraTO Play Contest, the Chicano-Latino Literary Contest, the National Theatre Artists in Residency grant, The Tennessee Williams One-Act Play Award, the Arizona Commission on the Arts Playwriting Fellowship and Project grants, the American Blues Blue Ink Playwriting Award among others.  Her work has been produced in Panama City, Sydney, Australia and across the United States. She is a long-term Playwright-in-Residence at the Arizona Theatre Company and Resident Playwright at Chicago Dramatists. Her first play of the war trilogy, GRAVEYARD OF EMPIRES, received its World Premiere at 16^th Street Theatre. It received high praise in the Chicago Tribune and was recommended for the Jeff Awards. The second play of the trilogy, A WORK OF ART, received its World Premiere in Chicago last summer in a co-production between the Goodman Theatre and Chicago Dramatists. Both plays will be excerpted by Smith and Kraus. Other recent project include, MODERN SLAVE, commissioned by Ford’s Theatre in DC and presented at Victory Gardens. She is currently working on the third play of her border trilogy with an NEA grant at the Arizona Theatre Company. The first two plays of the trilogy WETBACK and MOTHER OF EXILES have been developed around the U.S. Her plays have been published and anthologies extensively throughout the U.S. by Samuel French, Vintage Books, Smith & Kraus, and Simon and Schuster She has taught at Northwestern University, UW-Madison, and is currently an Assistant Professor in the UA’s School of Theatre, Film, and Television. She is an alum of the Sundance Institute. She thanks the Confluence Center for Creative Inquiry for their support of Barrio Stories.