About
The Artist
From panzas to prisons, from street theatre to large-scale multimedia performances, from princess to chafa – Virginia Grise writes plays that are set in bars without windows, barrio rooftops, and lesbian bedrooms.
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). Virginia is a recipient of the Yale Drama Award, Whiting Writers’ Award, the Princess Grace Award in Theatre Directing, and the Jerome Fellowship from the Playwrights Center. She is an alumna of the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, the Women's Project Theatre Lab and the NALAC Leadership Institute.
In addition to plays, she has created an interdisciplinary body of work that 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 Mía Theatre in Dallas, Texas and a Matakyev Research Fellow at the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University.
Artist Statement
The first poem I ever read publicly was in the juvenile detention center in Austin, Texas. Over fifteen years later, this has continued to have a lasting impact on my work. Prisons, both literal and metaphorical, the boxes people try to put us in, and state violence are tropes that recur in my writing and the performances I direct. I make theater, in part, as an attempt to liberate myself from confinement, conventional rules, norms, and structures, an attempt to imagine freedom.
I have never arrived anywhere in a straight line so I don’t know how to tell a story in that way. Stylistic elements that have become characteristic of my work, such as circular storytelling, overlapping narratives, repetition and the collapsing of time and space reflect how I move in the world. In South Texas, we dance in a circle counterclockwise. In the back of dark bars without windows, I learned how a community takes over space, how a people move, transcend the present moment; how a people dream. I want to write and direct plays that are in a constant state of motion: music playing, voices overlapping, and bodies that can’t stop dancing, which to me is the same as dreaming.
