Elaine Romero
Elaine Romero, MFA, is an Associate Professor in the UArizona School of Theatre, Film and Television, an award-winning playwright, and an affiliated faculty member with the Human Rights Practice program.
Romero’s plays have been presented across the U.S. and abroad; she is widely published in over 50 publications. Like Heaven received its AEA premiere with the Bridge Initiative in Phoenix. Prosperita was in the Red Bull Short Play Festival, starring Liza Colón-Zayas (“The Bear"). Secret Things received a critically-acclaimed production at 1st Stage, named by DC Metro Theater Arts as one of the best Outstanding Professional Theatre Productions. Her work is featured in Banned Together on the Broadway Podcast Network. She recently received the Udall Fellowship to begin research and development of The Invisible Line which will look at the conflict of federal and state public policy on the U.S./Mexican border and its impact on the lives of migrants and border residents. She recently completed Elaine Romero’s El Tiradito, an open-air show at the eponymous shrine, commissioned by Coalción Derechos Humanos and Teatro Dignidad. The play involved activist and human rights partners from across the community for conversations around the issues of the play.
Arizona Theatre Company’s (ATC) month-long RomeroFest, featured her work at theatres nationally and internationally in March 2021 with over seventeen separate projects. Collaborating companies included Artists Repertory Theatre, Scoundrel & Scamp Theatre, Notre Dame University, InterAct Theatre Company, Seven Devils New Play Foundry, Winding Road Theatre Ensemble, Teatro Travieso/Troublemaker Theater, Justice Theatre Project, and Foro Shakespeare in Mexico City. Revolutions/Revoluciones, Wetback, Like Heaven, and Bloody River shortly before the pandemic. Revolutions/Revoluciones, was presented in Spanish translation, at LATC, under Mexican director, Bruno Bichir. When Reason Sleeps (Headlands Center for the Arts, A-I-R, O’Neill Finalist), Graveyard of Empires (16th St. Theatre), A Work of Art (Goodman Theatre/Chicago Dramatists), A-I-R), and Martínez in Taos (Arizona Theatre Company make up Romero’s war pentalogy. Her Border Trilogy includes Wetback, Mother of Exiles, and Title IX, commissioned by ATC and included in the 2017 Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference. It will soon be in print.
Romero has been the fortunate recipient of the TCG/Pew National Theatre Artist-in-Residence grant, the NEA/TCG Playwright-in-Residence Program, the Blue Ink Playwrights Award, the Sprenger-Lang New History Foundation Award, the Chicano/Latino Literary Award, and many others. Her work has been published by Dramatists Play Service, Samuel French, Playscripts, Simon and Schuster, Vintage Books among others. She wrote the film, A Sentiment (Burning Coal Theatre/The Justice Theatre Project). A Sentiment and Swastika were published by TRW. Permission is published by Routledge. Harriet and Irene, a play about playwright Maria Irene Fornés and her girlfriend, Harriet Sohmers, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.
Romero is an Associate Professor in the School of Theatre, Film, and Television at the University of Arizona and Playwright-in-Residence and Director of the National Latine Playwrights Award & Festival for ATC. Romero has supported the mission of Latine Playwriting in this role since 1998 and has delighted in the success of former winners. She believes in the axiom, “We rise together.” She previously taught film and television writing at Northwestern University. She holds her MFA in Playwriting from UC Davis. She is ever-grateful she can stand on her head.