An award-winning U.S. playwright, Elaine Romero’s plays have been presented across the U.S. and abroad; she is also widely published and anthologized in over 50 publications. Her new play, Prosperita, will be presented next week at the Red Bull Short Play Festival: ALCHEMY in New York. Secret Things received a critically-acclaimed production in November/December 2021 at 1st Stage where the play was name by DC Metro Theater Arts as one of the best Outstanding Professional Theatre Productions of 2021. Her commissioned play, The Grotowski Method, premiered last year, sparking conversations about race in a rural Midwestern town. The month-long, RomeroFest, featured her work at theatres nationally and internationally in March 2021 with over seventeen separate projects. Initiated by the Arizona Theatre Company, some of the collaborating companies included Artists Repertory Theatre, Scoundrel & Scamp Theatre, 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 were all produced prior to the pandemic. Revolutions/Revoluciones, in Spanish translation, at LATC, under famed Mexican director, Bruno Bichir. When Reason Sleeps (Headlands Center for the Arts, A-I-R ) is the final play to be drafted in Romero’s war pentalogy, including Graveyard of Empires (16th St. Theatre), A Work of Art (Goodman Theatre/Chicago Dramatists), A-I-R), Martínez in Taos (Arizona Theatre Company).

Modern Slave, commissioned by Ford’s Theatre, was presented at the 2017 Seven Devils Playwrights Conference. It was developed at A Contemporary Theatre (Seattle), Victory Gardens Theatre (Chicago), and The Road Theatre (LA). From her Arizona/Mexico border trilogy (Mother of Exiles, Wetback), her Arizona Theatre Company commission, Title IX, was included in the 2017 Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference.

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.

Romero’s 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). Chatham Life and Style named the piece in the top five of the 19th Amendment Project. Two Viral Monologues were recently produced, Oyster (24-Hour Plays/ATC; DPS) and Shackle (24-Hour Plays).
Some upcoming publications include Swastika, A Sentiment, Permission, and a new play about Maria Irene Fornés and Harriet Sohmers for Cambridge University Press.

Romero is a Steering Committee Member with the Latinx Theatre Commons. She served as the Southwest Regional Rep for the Dramatists Guild of America. She has had the good fortune of being a member of NBC’s Writer’s on the Verge, the CBS Writers’ Diversity Program, and the NHMC’s Latino Writers’ Program. She previously taught film and television writing at Northwestern University.

Romero is an Associate Professor in the School of Theatre, Film, and Television at the University of Arizona, Tucson, Ariz., and the Playwright-in-Residence at Arizona Theatre Company.

She is ever-grateful she can stand on her head.