Quiara Alegría Hudes

Early life

Hudes was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to a Jewish father and a Puerto Rican mother. They raised her in West Philadelphia, where she began composing music and writing. She also studied at the Mary Louise Curtis Branch of Settlement Music School, taking piano lessons with Dolly Krasnopolsky. She has stated that although she is of "Puerto Rican and Jewish blood", she was "raised by two Puerto Rican parents". Her step-father was a Puerto Rican entrepreneur. She graduated from Central High School. She studied music composition at Yale University, where she earned her B.A., and playwriting at Brown University, earning an M.F.A. She is a resident writer at New Dramatists and a previous Page 73 Playwriting Fellow. Hudes is a visiting professor in the theater department at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.

Career

The original Off-Broadway production of In the Heights received the Lucille Lortel Award and Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Musical. It was named Best Musical of 2007 by New York Magazine and Best of 2007 by the New York Times, and garnered Hudes an HOLA Award for Outstanding Achievement in Playwriting from the Hispanic Organization of Latin Actors.

Hudes' first play, Yemaya's Belly, received the 2003 Clauder Competition for New England Playwriting, the Paula Vogel Award in Playwriting, and the Kennedy Center/ACTF Latina Playwriting Award and had productions at the Portland Stage Company (2005), the Signature Theatre (2005), and Miracle Theatre (2004).

Her play Elliot, a Soldier's Fugue was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2007. The play premiered at Page 73 Productions at the Off-Broadway Culture Project in 2006, and ran at the Alliance Theatre, Atlanta, Georgia in 2006. The New York Times reviewer wrote that the play was "rare and rewarding thing: a theater work that succeeds on every level, while creating something new."

Her play 26 Miles received its world premiere at The Alliance Theatre in Atlanta in March 2009, directed by Kent Gash. Her children's musical Barrio Grrrrl! appeared at The Kennedy Center in 2009. In 2009, Hudes was a Pulitzer finalist for the second time for In the Heights, co-written with Lin-Manuel Miranda. In 2012, her play Water by the Spoonful, which returns to the characters in Eliot, won the Pulitzer Prize after its premiere at the Hartford Stage Company.

Her play The Happiest Song Plays Last, the third in the Eliot trilogy, opened at the Goodman Theater in Chicago on April 13, 2013, and Off-Broadway at Second Stage in March 2014.

Her play Daphne’s Dive premiered Off-Broadway at the Signature Theater on May 16, 2016, directed by Thomas Kail and featuring Samira Wiley, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Vanessa Aspillaga and Carlos Gomez.

In 2010, she was named a Fellow by United States Artists. Hudes's first children's book, In My Neighborhood, was published by Arthur Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic Inc, in 2010.

On October 27, 2011, Quiara Alegría Hudes was the second female (and first Hispanic) to be inducted into Central High School's Alumni Hall Of Fame. In October 2016, a new musical Hude's wrote along with singer/songwriter Erin McKeown titled Miss You Like Hell opened at the La Jolla Playhouse directed by Lear deBessonet and starring Daphne Rubin-Vega.

In December 2016, Hudes will write the script for Lin-Manuel Miranda's animated movie Vivo for Sony Pictures Animation with Kirk DeMicco as director and will be released in December 18, 2020.