Octavio Solis is a playwright and author whose works Quixote Nuevo, Mother Road, Lydia, Hole in the Sky, Alicia’s Miracle, Se Llama Cristina, John Steinbeck’s The Pastures of Heaven, Ghosts of the River, June in a Box, Lethe, Marfa Lights, Gibraltar, The Ballad of Pancho and Lucy, The 7 Visions of Encarnación, Bethlehem, Dreamlandia, El Otro, Man of the Flesh, Prospect, El Paso Blue, Santos & Santos, and La Posada Mágica have been mounted at the Hartford Stage, the Huntington Theatre, the Houston Alley Theatre, Roundhouse Theatre, PCPA Conservatory Theatre, Cara Mia Theatre, California Shakespeare Theatre, Mark Taper Forum, Yale Repertory Theatre, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, the Dallas Theater Center, the Magic Theatre, Intersection for the Arts, South Coast Repertory Theatre, the San Diego Repertory Theatre, Shadowlight Productions, the Venture Theatre in Philadelphia, Theatre @ Boston Court, the Kitchen Dog Theatre, Teatro Vista, El Teatro Campesino, the Undermain Theatre, Thick Description, Campo Santo, INTAR, and Cornerstone Theatre. His collaborative works include Cloudlands, with Music by Adam Gwon and Shiner, written with Erik Ehn. Solis has received an NEA 1995-97 Playwriting Fellowship, the Kennedy Center’s Roger L. Stevens award, the Will Glickman Playwright Award, the 1998 TCG/NEA Theatre Artists in Residence Grant, the 1998 McKnight Fellowship grant from the Playwrights Center in Minneapolis, and the National Latino Playwriting Award for 2003. He is the recipient of the 2000-2001 National Theatre Artists Residency Grant from TCG and the Pew Charitable Trust, the United States Artists Fellowship for 2011, the 2014 Pen Center USA Award for Drama, and the 2019 Guest Artist Honoree for the William Inge Center for the Arts. Solis is a Thornton Wilder Fellow for the MacDowell Colony, New Dramatists alum, a member of the Dramatists Guild, and a 2020 inductee into the Texas Institute of Letters. His book Retablos: Stories From A Life Lived Along The Border is published by City Lights Publishing.
Chi-wang Yang is a Los Angeles-based theater director and interdisciplinary artist. Whether in the form of plays, operas, concerts, or installation, his work is physical, experimental, and collaborative. He is committed to expanding notions of identity and theatrical form and to exploring strange encounters of body, emotion, and technology.
He is a founding member and co-artistic director of video performance collective Cloud Eye Control. Chi-wang is a faculty member of the California Institute of the Arts School of Theater, where he teaches acting and serves as Associate Artistic Director of the CalArts Center for New Performance. He received his MFA in Theater Directing and Integrated Media at CalArts and his BA from Brown University.
His work has been presented internationally at theaters, museums, and festivals including REDCAT, SFMoMA, Fusebox Festival, PICA TBA, San Francisco International Film Festival, EXIT Festival (France), Santiago a Mil (Chile), Manipulate (Scotland), Havana Film Festival, and the Edinburgh Fringe. mysteriously.org