Alejandro Rodriguez
2023
Playwright/Literary
Miami, FL
Alejandro Rodriguez is a Miami-based writer, director, and founding Artistic Director of The Peace Studio’s Artist as Catalyst Program. His writing has been featured in collaborations with musicians, choreographers, and filmmakers all over the globe. His first full-length show, Sorry, enjoyed two sold-out runs at the LaGuardia Performing Arts Center (LPAC) in New York, and his earlier work, Now is the Time, was produced three times in NYC including at the Joyce in Chelsea. He has been the recipient of residencies through the Miami Light Project, SPACE at Ryder Farm, Makehouse, and the Center for Innovation in the Arts at Juilliard, as well as grants from the Queens Council of the Arts, CUNY Dance Initiative, and the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs. He’s lectured at multiple colleges, is on faculty at The Performing Arts Project, and has carried an adjunct professorship in the CUNY school system.
Rodriguez’s newest creation, In My Body, a collaboration with the Canadian street dance company, Bboyizm, is currently on tour across Canada and was the recipient of four Dora Awards in 2022 including one for Outstanding Production. Directing credits include Letters from Cuba and Anna in the Tropics for The Acting Company, Wilder & Wilder for PlayMakers Repertory Company, and many more. He began his career as an actor and performed in theaters across the US such as the Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, the Guthrie Theater, and the Humana Festival, as well as on television. Formerly, he served as the Associate Artistic Director for PlayMakers, and as Deputy Executive Director for Arts Ignite (formerly ASTEP,) a global nonprofit that delivers art education to over 3000 children annually on four continents. Rodriguez is a graduate of Juilliard where he was awarded the Michel St. Denis Prize for outstanding achievement.
BIO
All my life I’ve been a technologist(Language is the oldest technology). I grew up scribbling poems on napkins and pizza boxes. For years, I memorized Nas by day and acted in plays by dead white men at night, worried these two would never converge. Then Ntozake Shange, Teo Castellanos, and so many others taught me otherwise, that spoken word & movement were the essential DNA of theater and that these ancient technologies were used by indigenous shamans and African griots long before they were locked into the confines of European prosceniums. From then on, I became an alchemist, collaborating with other sorcerers to put the human voice on stage in extraordinary ways, to place words in sequences that click into beautiful sculptures of thought. Now I’m back home in Miami, eager to offer my learning as compost back to the soil that fertilized me.
The Sufi poet, Hafiz, once asked: “God, what love-mischief can we do for the world today?”
This is the only question on my heart right now.
STATEMENT
How can we make the outdoors a space of belonging?
My response comes hurtling up my spine: simply put, we must remember. We must remember that we are not separate from nature, that we ARE nature. We are breath, bone & blood - wind, earth, water - and before we locked ourselves in offices, bedrooms, and social media feed, the outdoors was our original space of belonging. I don’t take lightly the barriers – internal & external – that have been erected to make many of us feel like tourists in our own homes. In my writing, I am nourished by many streams - history, science, somatics – and animated by an unflagging belief that we are each equal inheritors of the earth, so I seek to communicate in a vernacular that my primos and abuelos could understand and see themselves reflected in. This residency is an extension of my central concern as an artist – how do we center care in our work, especially for those who have historically felt unwelcome in these spaces, and tell stories that wake up the potent memory of belonging that is in our marrow.