Elaine Romero

Elaine Romero is an award-winning Latina playwright, who grew up close to the border in San Juan Capistrano, California and has lived in Tucson, Arizona for many years. She is now an assistant professor at the University of Arizona, teaching play writing, script writing and dramaturgy.

Romero has three brothers. Her mother was an educator and her father was a businessman. Her parents encouraged Romero and her siblings to be socially conscious and to be able to express their thoughts. As a result, her home was a home where “conversations about poverty, the death penalty, the prevalence of homelessness, presidential elections and warfare were commonplace, as were talks about the importance of community and charity”. Her upbringing is reflected in her plays, where characters that live in tragic and unfortunate situations are explored and social justice issues are presented to start conversations. Her work oftentimes presents characters that exist in more than one realm. She believes that every individual exists in different planes and is interested in capturing those unique experiences

Romero has an interest in the Mexico-United States border. She has some experience with the border, as someone who had to go through a border checkpoint to visit her grandparents in San Diego, CaliforniaRomero decided to write a trilogy that looks at the Mexican/Arizona border issues. Two plays from the trilogy are Wetback and Mother of Exiles. With the help of a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Arizona Theatre Company was able to commission Romero to write the last play of her trilogy, as well as give the playwright the opportunity to lead a project called Voices of a New America. This project focuses on developing and celebrating the voices of Latino writers all over the country.

She also has an interest in plays that talk about war. Romero’s grandfather fought in the Battle of Iwo Jima and her uncle was lost in the Vietnam War when she was fiver years old. Romero started by writing ten-minute plays, until she realized that she had a lot more to say about war. Romero decided to write a trilogy of the United States at war, which are Graveyard of Empires, A Work of Art, and Rain of Ruin. Graveyard of Empires was produced by the 16th Street Theater and won the American Blues Theater's Blue Ink Playwriting Award. In developing A Work of Art, Romero was a member of the Goodman Playwrights Unit at the Goodman Theatre. In both plays, Romero focuses on how war emotionally traumatizes those who do service for the United States as well as family members. There is no representation of the United States as a nation or information on war combats. Thus, Romero concentrates on the emotional damage caused by war in a non-linear and in some instances, non-realistic way. Romero is currently working on Rain of Ruin to complete the trilogy.

Romero has participated in the National Hispanic Media Coalition’s Television Writer’s Program, NBCS’s Writers on the Verge Program, and CBS Diversity Institute’s Writer’s Mentorship Program. She has also received many awards, some of which are the Arizona Commission on the Arts Playwriting Fellowship, TCG/Pew National Theatre Artist in Residence grant, the Los Angeles Film School Scholarship, the Sprenger-Lang New History Play Contest, the Tennessee Williams One-Act Play Award, and the Chicano/Latino Literary Award.