Photo by Deborah Lopez
MIGDALIA CRUZ, a 2025 Refocus Project Spotlight Artist@Roundabout and 2023 DGF Legacy Playwright, is a Bronx-born writer, lyricist, translator, and librettist with over 60 works performed in 150 venues across 40 cities in 12 countries at various venues including: Mabou Mines, Classic Stage Company, Playwrights Horizons, INTAR, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Monarch Theater, En-Garde Arts, HOME, Shaliko Company, New York Shakespeare Festival’s Festival Latino, Theatre For The New City, and the W.O.W. Cafe (New York); Ateneo Puertorriqueño (PR); National Theater of Greece(Athens); Foro Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (Mexico City); Old Red Lion (London, England); Vancouver Players (Vancouver, B.C.); Latino Chicago Theater Company (Chicago); Houston Grand Opera (Houston); American Repertory Theatre (Cambridge); Cleveland Public Theatre (Cleveland); Frank Theatre (Minneapolis); Théâtre d’aujourd hui (Montreal); American Music Theatre Festival (Philadelphia); Intersection for the Arts/LATA (San Francisco); and Cornerstone Theater Company (Los Angeles). Among her awards and residencies are the NEA, McKnight, NYSCA, NYFA, Sundance@UCross, Sundance Screenwriting and Playwriting, Massachusetts Cultural Council grant, Connecticut Commission on The Arts grant, and the Bay Area Playwrights Festival. In 2013, she was named the Helen Merrill Distinguished Playwright. Cruz’s voice was nurtured by her mentor, María Irene Fornés at INTAR’s playwriting lab, and her residency at Latino Chicago Theater Company, and the Lark–translating four plays for the LARK’s Mexico/U.S. Word Exchange. She co-chairs the DGF Playwriting Fellows, mentors the Latinx Playwrights’ Circle, was listed on The Kilroys Web 2023, and has taught at Princeton, NYU, IU, and as founding member of the Fornés Institute’s Playwriting Workshop. She also led the 2018 LaMaMa/Umbria Playwrights’ Retreat in Spoleto, Italy. She received commissions from Clubbed Thumb, Mabou Mines, NYSF’s Public Theater, Crossroads Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre, Latino Chicago Theater Company, Arena Stage, The Homebound Project, Planet Connections, WNYC-radio, Ballet Hispanico, DUO, and INTAR, among others. Migdalia is a 1996 recipient of the Kennedy Center’s Fund for New American Plays award for Another Part Of The House. Her play, The Have-little was the runner-up for the 1991 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and SALT was a 1997 runner-up. She participated in Obsidian Theatre of Toronto’s International Playwrights Festival in 2009. At Classic Stage Company, she was a 1994 PEW/TCG National Artist in Residence. Migdalia was a 1997-98 Sackler Fellow at Connecticut Rep/UConn, a 1988 McKnight Fellow, and received her MFA degree from Columbia University. Migdalia is an alumna of New Dramatists, and a member of The Tent, a theater for “Vintage” playwrights. She was featured in: “Fifty Key Figures in Latinx and Latin American Theatre.” Her recent essays and interviews appeared in the publications: “Shakespeare And Latinidad,” “Diasporic Journeys: Interviews with Puerto Rican Writers in the United States,” “A History of Latinx Performing Arts in the U.S.,” “The Routledge Companion to Latiné Theatre and Performance,” “Fornés In Context,” “Pragmatic Liberation and the Politics of Puerto Rican Diasporic Drama,” and “Outlaw Theater.” Her plays have been included in the TCG’s “Out of the Fringe,” Arte Publico’s “Shattering the Myth: Plays by Hispanic Women, NoPassport Press’ “El Grito Del Bronx and other plays by Migdalia Cruz,” and in many other publications. ACMRS Press recently published her translations of Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Richard III. Her work has been translated into English, Spanish, French, Arabic, Farsi and Greek. Among Cruz’s touchstone plays: Miriam’s Flowers, FUR, Lolita de Lares, SALT, Lucy Loves Me, Never Moscow, Dreams of Home, Telling Tales, Featherless Angels, ¡CHE-CHE-CHE!, Latins In La-La Land, Cigarettes and Moby-Dick, Yellow Eyes, and Running For Blood: No. 3 (a radio play) and El Grito Del Bronx. She wrote book and lyrics for the musicals Rushing Waters, Welcome Back To Salamanca, and When Galaxy Six and The Bronx Collide; the libretto for an opera, Street Sense; an operetta, The Touch Of An Angel; and lyrics and monologues for Frida: The Story of Frida Kahlo. Her anthology “The Impossible Plays of Migdalia Cruz,” including the plays Fishtank, Satyricoño, and Two Roberts: a Pirate-Blues Project, was published in the Sledgehammer Series of Tripwire Harlot Press, launching in October 2024. A production of her Macbeth will be seen at Purchase College in 2025 and the Magic Theatre in 2026. In her time on Earth, she was honored to meet the Dalai Lama, Robert Redford and Rita Moreno. What a blessing!
Recent Projects: Latins In La-La Land @ RefocusProject@Roundabout (May 2025); Fish Tank @ Clubbed Thumb (Jan2022); lookinglass: some thoughts on day four@ PlanetConnections, June 2020; Meat & Other Broken Promises @Homebound 4th Edition, July 2020; Never Moscow workshopped at U. of Evansville, November 2020; Richard III translation (a PlayOn!Shakespeare Project) @TheatreSpace NorthEast (Sunderland, England), Summer 2021, and Macbeth in 2020, also produced in 2018 by Actors’ Shakespeare Company in Boston & the African-American Shakespeare Company in San Francisco & at CSC at the PlayOnFestival in NYC (2019); a geo-located performance in Battery Park, Lives of the New Kind of Saints @INTAR, November 2020; FUR produced by Boundless and presented at NextDoor@NYTW, 2019; The Book of Miaou: Don’t Drink Everything Your Mother Pours You @ Princeton University, in conjunction with the Fornés Symposium in April 2018; El Grito del Bronx at Brown University(4/14), NYU/Tisch (4/08), at the Milagros Theatre (OR) 4/09, and at the Goodman in a co-production with Teatro Vista & CollaborAction (IL), 7/09; She developed Two Roberts: A Pirate-Blues Project at the Lark (NY) with a 2010 NYSCA grant; Petronius’ (69a.d.) & Fellini’s (1968) Satyricon inspires her Satyricoño about 21st C. America; and is at work on a play about Chekhov, marriage & his death by consumption as he wrote the Three Sisters, called Never Moscow. Telling Tales was produced in Santurce, P.R., Interacto (1/13); and Lucy Loves Me, was produced by INTAR in 2/13. In 2015, 2017 & 2018, FRIDA@ Long Beach Theatre, Michigan Opera Theatre, and Anchorage Opera Company. A Cold Spring Awakening at Half-Moon Theater’s “all you can eat” play festival @ the Culinary Institute of America (Poughkeepsie, NY); Yellow Eyes @ Visión Latino (Chicago); Latins In La-La Land at the College of Wooster (OH). 2016: FUR @ Hero Theatre’s Festival Irene (L.A.) & Venus Theatre (D.C.); Lolita de Lares @ Urban Theater Company (Chicago). Her Macbeth translation can be heard in a podcast via ncpodcast.com, launched in April 2021, and will be presented in a staged reading by BlackGirlsLoveTheBard, October 2021. In June 2021, Yorick’s Last Laugh: a dead comedy jam wherein he spills the “T” about the Danish royal family premiered at Shakespeare Dallas.
Twitter & Instagram: @michiMigdalia