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Christopher oscar pe a
Christopher Oscar Peña is a playwright, screenwright, actor and educator who resides in New York City. He teaches theater at NYU's Tisch School of Arts and is a member of the Playwrights Unit at Goodman Theatre in Chicago. He also has had work commissioned by Yale Repertory Theatre. Peña is the co-writer of the Golden Globe nominated TV series, Jane the Virgin and was on the "Future Broadway Power List," by Backstage (magazine) in 2014.
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2011 ink d writing fellows christopher oscar pe a
Career
As a playwright, Peña has produced a large number of plays, some of which have been produced all over the United States and in the UK. Peña's plays include Maelstrom, Icarus Burns, Alone Above A Raging Sea, L(y)re, The Suicide Tapes and Awe/Struck. His work has been developed or seen in theaters in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles such as: The Public Theater, INTAR Theatre, LAByrinth Theater Company, Goodman Theatre, Theater for the New City, Son of Semele Theater and more. As part of the T.S. Eliot US/UK Exchange in 2011, Peña attended the premiere of his play However Long The Night at the The Old Vic. In 2013, Peña's play Tiny People (or, it gets better) was a finalist for both the O'Neill Playwrights Conference and the Sundance Theatre Lab, and was selected to feature at the Crossing Borders Festival. His play, A Cautionary Tail premiered at The Flea Theater where every performance sold out and the production was extended twice. In 2014, he co-produced his first play in Chicago, with Melissa Lusk called I Wonder If Its Possible For a Love Affair To Last Forever? Or Things I Found On Craigslist, which premiered at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Peña is a recipient of the Norman Corwin Award for excellence in audio theatre.
As a screenwriter, Peña created and is the co-star of the web series 80/20, which focuses on viewing sexuality as a spectrum. 80/20 was selected for the 2013 New Media Film Festival and the 2015 Outfest Web Series: In With The New Out. The web series also won the 2013 LAWEBFEST Outstanding Achievement writing award. Peña is a writer for the Golden Globe nominated TV show, Jane the Virgin on The CW.
Peña's works frequently focus on stories that deal with bicultural identities, sexuality, and growing up in the modern world. An example is Peña's Icarus Burns, a play set in 2009 that touches on such political hot topics as immigration, gay marriage and domestic abuse in order to portray the difficulties that marginalized communities face when trying to thrive in America. A Latino himself, Peña works closely with culturally diverse theaters like The Lark Playwright Workshop, US/UK Exchange, INTAR'S Hispanic Playwrights Lab, Diverse City Theater Company and New York Theatre Workshop, where he was named an Emerging Artist of Color Fellow. Through these relationships, he works to represent a variety of cultural and sexual populations in theater. In 2012, Peña performed at the INTAR Producing Latino Voices in English Festival; while In 2009, he won the Latino Playwrights Award from The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for his work, Maelstrom.
Peña's work is published by NoPassport Press and Smith and Kraus.
Personal life
Peña is from San Jose, California. He received his B.A. in Dramatic Arts from the University of California, Santa Barbara and his M.F.A. in Dramatic Writing from the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU.