Artist Bio

(Bio as of June 2019)

Marisela Treviño Orta is an award-winning playwright, a graduate of the Iowa Playwrights Workshop and a Playwrights’ Center Core Writer. A poet for many years, Marisela found her way to the playwriting in 2004 while completing an MFA in writing at the University of San Francisco, where she studied poetry. This season Marisela’s play Wolf at the Door will receive a National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere at New Jersey Repertory Company, Kitchen Dog Theater, Milagro Theatre and Halcyon Theatre. Her other plays include Alcira; American Triage; Braided Sorrow (Su Teatro); Ghost Limb (Brava Theatre); Heart Shaped Nebula (Shotgun Players); Shoe; The River Bride (Oregon Shakespeare Festival) and Woman on Fire (Camino Real Productions). Marisela is an alumna of the Playwrights Foundation’s Resident Playwright Initiative, a founding member of the Bay Area Latino Theatre Artists Network and a member of the Latinx Theatre Commons’ national steering committee. Currently she is working on an adaptation Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit and has also begun a new cycle of worst-case scenario plays—sci-fi thriller plays including WMB (pronounced “womb”) and Nightfall. Her work has been commissioned by American Conservatory Theater, Latino Playwrights Initiative, Marin Theatre Company, Nashville Children’s Theatre and San Francisco Grants for the Arts. She has been awarded the 2006 Chicano/Latino Literary Prize in Drama, 2009 Pen Center USA Literary Award in Drama, 2012 Nuestras Voces Finalist (Repertorio Español), 2012 O’Neill National Playwrights Conference Semifinalist, 2013 National Latino Playwriting Award Co-Winner (Arizona Theatre Company), 2013 Global Age Project Finalist (Aurora Theatre Company), 2016 Kilroys List, 2016 Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival Latinidad Playwriting Award Runner Up, 50 Playwrights Project’s Best Unproduced Latin@ Plays of 2017, 2018 O’Neill National Playwrights Conference Semifinalist and 2019 Kendeda Finalist (Alliance Theatre).