Biography
Luis Alfaro is a Chicano playwright, poet, and performance artist born and raised in the Pico-Union district of downtown Los Angeles. His work in the field has also included producer, director, dramaturg, screenwriter, and advocate, among others.
He received the 2025 Creative Impact Award from United States Artists and the Joyce Foundation. He was 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 (2020-2022), Associate Producer of New Play Development & Co-Director of the Latino Theatre Initiative (1995-2005) of Center Theatre Group at the Music Center of Los Angeles County, home of the Mark Taper Forum, Ahmanson & Kirk Douglas Theaters, where he produced over three hundred new play commissions, productions, workshops, and readings.
Luis is the director of the MFA in Dramatic Writing Program and an Associate Professor at the University of Southern California. 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 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 PEN America/Laura Pels International Foundation Theater Award for a Master Dramatist, United States Artists; Ford Foundation Art of Change; Joyce Foundation; Mellon Foundation; 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-current); Artist Collective at CTG (2020-2021), Artistic Associate at Playwrights Arena (1999-2021) for 22 years, and served on the artistic staff for the Ojai Playwrights Conference for twenty years (2002-2022).
His plays include The Labours, Speaking in Tongues, Lady Killer, Aztlan, 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.
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.
In 2025, Aztlan was produced at the Magic Theater in San Francisco and was a finalist for the prestigious Bay Area Glickman Prize. In 2024, The Travelers was also produced at the Magic Theater and won the 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 was awarded the 2024 L.A. Stage Raw Award in playwriting.
Luis spent two decades in the Los Angeles Poetry and Performance Art communities, where he was published regularly in anthologies, created over thirty performance pieces, hundreds of poems, and presented his work at Highways Performance Space, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) and Beyond Baroque Poetry Center, among the many community spaces of Los Angeles.
He was featured in the PBS series, The United States of Poetry (1996).
His book, ‘The Greek Trilogy of Luis Alfaro’, edited by Rosa Andujar, is the winner of the prestigious Greek & British Hellenic Prize, and is licensed by Concord Theatricals.
Recent 2026 publications include ‘Reimagining Classics, the Classroom and Community with Luis Alfaro’, edited by Young Richard Kim, from Routledge Press. He is a contributor to ‘Fornes in Context’ from Cambridge University 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, dramaturg Morgan Jenness, performance artist Scott Kelman, and a product of the Inner-City Cultural Center in downtown Los Angeles.
Current commissions include Latino Theatre Company, Getty Villa, Geffen Theater, and South Coast Repertory.