Assistant Professor Virginia Grise is a recipient of the Alpert Award in the Arts, Yale Drama Award, Whiting Writers’ Award and the Princess Grace Award in Theatre Directing. Her published work includes Your Healing is Killing Me, blu, The Panza Monologues and an edited volume of Zapatista communiqués titled Conversations with Durito. As a writer, performer, director and creative producer, she has an interdisciplinary body of work that includes plays, multimedia performance, dance theater, performance installations, guerrilla theater, site-specific interventions and community gatherings. She holds an M.F.A. in Writing for Performance from the California Institute of the Arts and is a founding member of a todo dar productions. She currently serves as the Mellon Foundation playwright in residence at Cara Mía Theatre.
Tell us about the classes you’ll be teaching this year.
I designed a class for the fall called Vision, Process, Agency, a workshop where students will craft artist statements and manifestos while learning the basics of grant writing and drafting project proposals. In the spring, I will teach Community Engagement, a required class for M.F.A. students in the Drama and Theatre for Youth and Communities program.
What attracted you to the Department of Theatre and Dance and The University of Texas at Austin?
I am excited to be joining the Department of Theatre and Dance as part of a recent initiative of the College of Fine Arts, Expanding Approaches to American Arts. This creates space and opens opportunities for scholars and practitioners to not only think more expansively about art and art-making, but to examine and interrogate the role of the arts in this particular moment, as we co-imagine new possibilities and pathways for the future of the arts in civil society.
How did your professional pathway lead to your research focus?
I was raised in San Antonio, Texas and graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with a major in History and Spanish. I became an artist in Austin because of innovative programs to bring artists, scholars and activists together, like the Austin Project produced by Dr. Omi Osun Joni L. Jones. After teaching in Texas public schools, I obtained my M.F.A. in Writing for Performance at the California Institute of the Arts. For the past 15 years, I have worked as a writer, performer, director and creative producer all over the country from the West Coast to the East Coast, from the Midwest to the Southwest, living in Minneapolis, Los Angeles and New York, before returning home to Texas. I have never viewed art and theory, politics and art, as separate. I understand art-making as knowledge production, storytelling as embodied knowledge, and central to my own research.
What’s something that students and colleagues should know about you?
I have guest lectured about my work at over 50 universities in the United States and have taught writing for performance at the university level, as a public school teacher, in community centers, women’s prisons and in the juvenile correction system. I am a curious and creative thinker and teacher who loves being introduced to new ideas, places, people and regenerative ways of being in the world.
What do you enjoy doing when you’re not teaching/researching/working?
I like chasing sunsets and reading in hammocks.