Vanessa Grise

“…Stylistic elements that have become characteristic of my work, such as repetition and the collapsing of time and space, are reflections of how I move in the world. I have never arrived anywhere in a straight line so I don’t know how to tell a story in that way. I want to write plays that are in a constant state of motion: music playing, voices overlapping, and bodies that can’t stop dancing, which to me is the same as dreaming…”

“…Ceremony and ritual were really part of my everyday: ancestor worship, talk story, limpias, the incense, tirando cartas, and countless visits to the curandera (because my mother was convinced I had the badness inside of me). I thought all of it was magic, even when the curandera spit holy water in my face. Being brown was magic. When you go to a really good curandera, something inside of you shifts energetically. As an artist, I want to be able to have that type of impact on people.”

“…I am an anxious person by nature, full of fear and insecurities. Those early years of figuring out how to make a living in theatre are hard and while my anxieties, fear and insecurities have not gone away, I proved to myself that I could make a living as an artist. Now I want to learn how to be a good artist, a really fucking good artist…”

“…As a queer brown woman from a working class family, making a living as an artist was an important goal for me to accomplish. In addition to being very determined, I have also been very fortunate…”