Virginia Grise

2013 Winner in
Drama

Virginia Grise is a recipient of the Alpert Award in the Arts, Yale Drama 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 a founding member of a todo dar productions, an alum of the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, the Women's Project Theatre Lab & the NALAC Leadership Institute. In addition to plays, she has created a body of work that is interdisciplinary and includes multimedia performance, dance theater, performance installations, guerilla theater, site specific interventions, and community gatherings. Virginia 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 MFA in Writing for Performance from the California Institute of the Arts and is the Mellon Foundation Playwright in Residence at Cara Mia Theatre.

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Reviews & Praise

"A timely and thought-provoking play, blu deserves the stage productions it will probably get. No one who comes to the show will have nothing to say about it." —Rigoberto Gonzalez, El Paso Times

“A knowing, provocative, and lyrical work that is as gorgeous as it is powerful.” —Jennie Webb, Backstage [on blu]

"Virginia Grise is a blazingly talented writer, and her play blu stays with you a long time after you've read it." —David Hare, 2010 Yale Drama competition judge

Selected Works

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From the Selection Committee

“Ms. Grise demonstrates power and ambition in stagecraft, wielding and keeping afloat several thematic strands. In Making Myth, she is searching for a voice with which to enter history, in a state of rage for the sake of justice. The oratorio quality of the writing allows direct historical and political commentary similar to what poetry can accomplish. Her play, blu, set in inner-city LA, crosses borders of custom, of laws, of spiritual realms, in incantatory, embodied language.”