Marisela Treviño Orta is an accidental playwright. She found her way to the genre while completing an MFA in Writing at the University of San Francisco (USF) where she studied poetry exclusively. While a student at USF, Marisela became the Resident Poet of El Teatro Jornalero!, a social justice theatre company comprised of Latino immigrants.
Marisela’s first play Braided Sorrow was presented at the 2005 Bay Area Playwrights Festival and the 2006 [Inside] the Ford Summer Reading Series. Braided Sorrow won the 2006 Chicano/Latino Literary Prize in Drama and received a 2008 world premiere at Su Teatro in Denver, CO, and won the 2009 Pen Center USA Literary Award in Drama.
Her other plays include: American Triage (2012 Repertorio Español Nuestras Voces Finalist); Heart Shaped Nebula (2012 O’Neill National Playwrights Conference Semi-Finalist, 2015 Shotgun Players world premiere); and Woman on Fire.
Marisela is an alumna of the Playwrights Foundation’s Resident Playwright Initiative, a founding member of the Bay Area Latino Theatre Artists Network (BALTAN), and a member of the Latina/o Theatre Commons’ national Steering Committee.
Currently, Marisela is pursuing an MFA at the University of Iowa’s Playwrights Workshop. There she is working to complete her grim Latino fairy tale cycle—plays which include The River Bride (2013 National Latino Playwriting Award Co-Winner, 2016 Oregon Shakespeare Festival world premiere), Wolf at the Door, and Alcira.
