Angelo Parra

Angelo Parra, an award-winning playwright, has had works produced in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and at Hartford Stage, Florida Stage, the Cape (Cod) Playhouse, the George Street Playhouse, Theatre Memphis, Trenton’s Passage Theatre, Florida Rep, and Penguin Rep Theatre, among other regional venues.

Angelo is the author of The Devil’s Music: The Life and Blues of Bessie Smith, the critically acclaimed musical play named among the “Top-Ten Off-Broadway Experiences of 2001” by the New York Daily News. He is also the author of Playwriting for Dummies.

Another of his plays, Journey of the Heart (which dramatizes the seesaw struggle of a hospital committee to decide who gets a heart for transplant – a young African American girl or an aging entertainment celebrity), won the Jewel Box Theatre Award, Mixed Blood Versus America Award, and David James Ellis Memorial Award. His screenplay version of Journey of the Heart was a finalist at the Sundance Institute Feature Film Program.

Two other plays, Casino and The Slope, were the recipients of a Fund for U.S. Artists at International Festivals and Exhibitions grant (a partnership of the National Endowment for the Arts, the U.S. Information Agency, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Pew Charitable Trusts), enabling Angelo to present the plays at the Edinburgh International Festival.

Angelo’s honors include two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships in Scriptwriting and the 1998 Chicano/Latino Literary Award (University of California). In 2000, he was named a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the prestigious Sewanee Writers Conference. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild and a member emeritus of the BMI/Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop.

Angelo Parra also is the founder and director of the Hudson Valley Professional Playwrights Lab, and teaches playwriting and performing arts at SUNY Rockland.