The education project milta ortiz on creating together
Milta Ortiz is a bilingual, bicultural playwright, poet, and performer born in El Salvador. She moved to the United States at the age of eight and was raised in Northern California. She received her MFA from Northwestern University’s Writing for the Screen & Stage program and a Creative Writing BA from San Francisco State University. She currently lives in Tucson, Arizona where she is the Marketing and Outreach Director at Borderlands Theatre Company.
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Milta ortiz at the ceyx series january 9 2012
Awards
Ortiz's works have been showcased at theaters across the country, and many of which have earned her prestigious recognition. Between 2006 and 2009, she received three Individual Artist Grants, two of which were from Oakland, California's Cultural Funding Program. The third grant was from the Zellerbach Family Foundation to "write and perform her solo work while in the Bay Area". In 2011, her play Last of the Lilac Roses was a finalist at Repertorio Español's Nuestras Voces playwriting contest; in 2012, her play Fleeing Blue won the Wichita State University playwriting contest, and, in 2013, she was a finalist in Downtown Urban Arts Festival in NYC for her work You, Me, and Tuno. This play then went on to be staged at Teatro Luna, Chicago's All-Latina Theater Company, in May 2013. You, Me, and Tuno focuses on the dangers of food deserts and the effects it has on communities of Color. Ortiz states, "Good food should not be for a select few. It should be affordable and accessible to all. It’s food justice. I’m very interested in that. Food is making us sick. So many Latinos and African Americans have diabetes and at younger and younger ages". Also in 2013, she became the National New Play Network resident playwright at Borderlands Theater Company, which then transitioned into the position she currently holds at the company.
Publishings
Along with playwriting, Ortiz worked as a creative writing teacher to young adults for over six years. She has also taught screenwriting to undergraduate students at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She has been published in WritersCorps' Teachers Anthologies (including Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds and City of Stairways: A Poet's Field Guide to San Francisco ), Teaching Artist Journal, and has created a self-published chapbook, Encantadas with Las Manas Tres.
Mirrors, written by Ortiz and published by the Teaching Artist Journal in 2011, explores what it was like for Ortiz to go from learning English just six months after emigrating to the United States at eight-years-old, to then go on to teach English as a second language to recently arrived immigrants. She states, "I had to go back to that place, that feeling of being new and inside out, I had moved so far away from. Every class was a learning experience for me. Every class triggered a different memory".
Other career information
Ortiz is the co-founder of the Hybrid Performance Experience (HyPE), which is a theater troupe known for their performances in public spaces throughout the Bay Area. She founded HyPE with her husband, Marc David Pinate, who is currently the Producing Director at Borderlands.