Virginia Grise


Virginia Grise is an award-winning playwright, and director. Grise's most recognized work is blu, the winner of the 2010 Yale Drama Series Award and a finalist for the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts' Latino/a Playwrighting Award. In addition, Grise is the co-writer of The Panza Monologues with Irma Mayorga, and edited a volume of Zapatista communiqués called Conversations with Don Durito. She is also a recipient of the Whiting Writers' Award and the Princess Grace Award in Theater Directing.

Early life and education

Grise grew up in San Antonio, Texas. Her father, Ronald Grise is from Goshen, Indiana and her mother, Emma Lesi Grise is from Monterrey, Mexico. Her maternal grandfather Manuel Yee was from Canton, China.
In 1998 Grise received her Bachelor of Arts in History and Spanish with a minor in Chicano Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. Grise also studied critical pedagogy and second language acquisition at the University of Texas and also earned her teaching certificate to teach English and Spanish as a secondary language. Grise has more than 15 years of teaching experience.
In 2009, she received her Master of Fine Arts in Writing for Performance from California Institute of the Arts. Her play blu, was developed at Cal Arts as her MFA thesis project under the mentorship of Carl Hancock Rux. Grise at the time was living in Boyle Heights and said, "every time I saw or heard helicopters I wrote a poem." These poems eventually transformed into the play blu, which is about a Chicano family that tries to envision a life and sky free of police and helicopters. Themes in blu are prison, war, state violence and desire.

Career

While teaching in Austin, Texas, Grise coordinated a series of writing workshop at the Travis County Juvenile Detention Center and Austin High School with La Peña Cultural Arts Center and Resistencia Bookstore. At the request of one of the students in the program, Grise read her first poem publicly at the juvenile detention center and later went on to study writing with Bridgforth. In addition to working with Bridgforth, Grise was a member of the Austin Project produced by Omi Osun and Joni Jones from 2003 to 2006. As a member of The Austin Project, she was introduced to experimental artists such as Erik Ehn, Robbie McCauley, Laurie Carlos, Daniel Alexander Jones and Carl Hancock Rux.
Grise has also been a guest lecturer and held writing workshops. In 2012, Grise served as a Visiting Writer in the Department of English and Literature at Pitzer College in Claremont, CA. She has been invited to share her works at universities including University of Southern California, Vassar College, Brown University, and Cornell University, to name a few

Activism

Grise began activism as a teenager as being part of the Brady Greene Teen Advisory Board, where she taught sexuality education classes in local high schools. She was also a founding member of Acción Zapatista, an organization in Austin, Texas, committed to spreading history of the Zapatistas, and other pro-Democracy movements in Mexico. As a member of Acción Zapatista, Grise served as an international peace observer in Chiapas, Mexico and organized protests, community forums, and attended the Intercontinental Encuentro Against Neo-Liberalism.
Grise was also a writing, directing, performing and founding member of Teatro Callejero, at the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center in San Antonio, Texas. The street theatre created performances around important issues affecting the city of Austin such as environmental racism and gentrification.
And as a middle school teacher at Kazen Middle School in San Antonio, Texas, Grise was an organizing member of Books in Barrio, a grassroots organization that successfully launched a campaign to locate a bookstore in a predominantly Mexican and working class community on the South Side of San Antonio.
Currently, she works with prison abolitionists and community organizations that are teaching inside women's prisons.

Awards and honors

Books

  1. The Panza Monologues, Second Edition
  2. blu
  3. Conversations with Don Durito: The Story of Durito and the Defeat of Neo-Liberalism
  4. The Panza Monologies

    Anthologies

  5. Monologues for Latino/a Actors
  6. Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academics and the Austin Project
  7. Gender on the Borderlands, Frontier: Journal of Women Studies
  8. Voices for Racial Justice

    Plays

  9. Siempre Norteada: Always Late, Always Lost
  10. Making Myth
  11. blu
  12. rasgos asiaticos
  13. The Mexican as Told by Us Mexicans
  14. behind barbed wire
  15. a farm for meme

    Performance installations/ Site-specific work

  16. flesh and bone, and from the Earth's body: how do you pull your own sadness up from the ground?
  17. Barrio Stories
  18. ponme la mano aqui
  19. i was born here
  20. Remember el Alma
  21. Teatro Callejero

    Dance theater

  22. would i then be...
  23. Passions
  24. held by dreams

    Short plays

  25. Teatro Organico
  26. Right to Remain
  27. Call to Prayer
  28. ESL
  29. Sha-Hell-No
  30. Death sounds like...
  31. corn does not grow in the museum
  32. woman in the walnut creek turned butterfly
  33. flower offering for lil girls who ride buses

    Citations