Biography
Luis Alfaro is a Chicano playwright, poet and performance artist born and raised in downtown Los Angeles.
He is the 2025/26 Atelier Samuel Beckett Fellow, traveling to France in 2026.
He is the 2024 World Theatre Artist for Theatre Communications Group (TCG) and the recipient of the 2024 award in literature from the American Academy of Arts & Letters.
He was the Associate Artistic Director of Center Theatre Group at the Music Center of Los Angeles County (2021-2022, 1995-2005), home of the Mark Taper Forum, Ahmanson & Kirk Douglas Theaters, where he produced over one hundred and fifty new play commissions, productions, workshops, and readings.
He is the only playwright in the history of the Kennedy Center to have received two ‘Fund for New American Play’ awards in the same year.
An Associate Professor at the University of Southern California, he is the director of the MFA in Dramatic Writing program. He was previously on faculty at California Institute of the Arts (Cal-Arts), Writers Program at UCLA Extension and a University of California Regents Fellow at U.C. Riverside.
He has received a fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, popularly known as a “genius grant”, awarded to people who have demonstrated expertise and exceptional creativity in their respective fields.
He is also the recipient of The United States Artists; Ford Foundation Art of Change; Joyce Foundation; Mellon Foundation; PEN America/Laura Pels International Foundation Theater Award for a Master Dramatist, among others.
He was the inaugural Playwright-in-Residence for six seasons at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (2013-2019); Playwright’s Ensemble at Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theatre (2013-2020); Inaugural Imaginistas Latinx Playwrights at the Los Angeles Theatre Center (2021-); and served on the artistic staff for the Ojai Playwrights Conference (2002-2022).
His plays include Aztlan, Earlimart, The Travelers, Electricidad, Oedipus El Rey, Mojada, Delano, Body of Faith, Alleluia the Road, Black Butterfly, Bruja, and Straight as a Line, which have been seen at regional theaters throughout the United States, Latin America, Canada, and Europe.
In 2024, The Travelers was produced at the Magic Theater in San Francisco and won the prestigious Bay Area 2024 Glickman Prize. The production traveled to the Los Angeles Theatre Center, where it was named one of the nine best productions of the year by the Los Angeles Times and is the winner of the 2024 L.A. Stage Raw award in playwriting.
Luis spent two decades in the Los Angeles Poetry and Performance Art communities, where he regularly presented at Highways Performance Space, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions and Beyond Baroque Poetry Center.
His book, The Greek Trilogy of Luis Alfaro, is the winner of the prestigious Greek & British Hellenic Prize and licensed by Dramatists Play Service.
Upcoming publications include Fornes in Context from Cambridge University Press, and The Theatre of Luis Alfaro from Routledge Press.
He is a local Emmy winner, and Emmy nominated for his short film, Chicanismo, which was produced by PBS, named Best Experimental Film at the San Antonio CineFestival and Best Short at CineAccion in San Francisco.
His recording, down-town, released on SST/New Alliance Records, was awarded Best Spoken-Word Release from the National Association of Independent Record Distributors.
He was a student of the playwright Maria Irene Fornes, performance artist Scott Kelman, and a product of the Inner-City Cultural Center in downtown Los Angeles.
Upcoming commissions include, Earlimart (Latino Theatre Company, Los Angeles), Herakles (Getty Villa, Malibu), Aztlán (Magic Theater, San Francisco) and new work for the Geffen Theater in Los Angeles, and South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa.