Editor and Contributor Biographies

Katherine Gillen is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University–San Antonio. She is the author of Chaste Value: Economic Crisis, Female Chastity, and the Production of Social Difference on Shakespeare’s Stage (Edinburgh University Press, 2017) and several essays on race, gender, and economics in early modern drama and Shakespeare appropriation. She is currently working on a monograph called Shakespeare’s Racial Classicism: Whiteness, Slavery, and Humanism, which examines Shakespeare’s use of classical sources within the context of emerging racial capitalism. With Kathryn Vomero Santos and Adrianna M. Santos, she co-founded the Borderlands Shakespeare Colectiva, which has received funding from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Josh Inocéncio is a Houston-based writer and theatre artist. After finishing his Master’s degree at Florida State University, he returned to Houston to tour his solo play Purple Eyes across Texas, which culminated in the world premiere at Stages Repertory Theatre. Two of his other plays — The Little Edelweiss; or, An Immigrant’s Fairytale and Chocolate Gravy & White Jesus — were semifinalists for the Eugene O’Neill National Playwright’s Conference. His work has been featured at Stages, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Greenhouse Theatre in Chicago, and Teatro Milagro in Portland, among others. He has also trained under Migdalia Cruz at the Maria Irene Fornés Playwriting Workshop. His short play Ofélio has been taught at several universities around the nation, including Amherst College, Texas A&M University–San Antonio, and Florida International University. Currently, Josh is completing his first novel.

James Lujan is a filmmaker, playwright, and educator from Taos Pueblo. Since 2012, he has served as the Department Chair of the Cinematic Arts & Technology program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. In 2022, he was appointed to the New Mexico Governor’s Council on Film and Media Industries.

Seres Jaime Magaña is a community theater director and author of the bilingual play The Tragic Corrido of Romeo and Lupe, performed at the Pharr Community Theater in 2018. His poems and short stories have been published across several anthologies. He has an English degree from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Seres teaches acting and creative writing classes online. In addition, Seres has also hosted several poetry and music events around the Rio Grande Valley, and he served as host for Saturday Open Mic Nights at Luna Coffee House for three years. He lives in McAllen, Texas, with his wife and children.

Tara Moses is an award-winning playwright, director, artistic director, and a citizen of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, Mvskoke. Her plays have been produced and developed with companies in New York, Connecticut, California, Oklahoma, Nevada, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C. As a playwright, her completed works include Sections, He’eo’o (Winner of the 2019 Native Storytellers Contest), Quantum (2020 and 2021 Finalist for the National Playwrights Conference), Bound (2019 Native American New Play Festival Winner), Don Juan, Arbeka, Patchwork, Oñgwehoñwe, Snag, Sugar, OklaHOME, Billie, Poyvfekcv, and Hamlet, El Príncipe de Denmark. She is Artistic Director of Red Eagle Soaring, and she co-founded Groundwater Arts and #Binge, where she also serves as Executive Producer. In addition, she serves on the Advisory Board of Broadway for Racial Justice and participated in New York Stage and Film’s inaugural NYSAF NEXUS project in 2021. She was Playwright-in-Residence at AlterTheatre Ensemble, a Cultural Capital Fellow with First Peoples Fund, and an Invited Playwright with HBMG Foundation’s National Winter Playwrights Retreat (2020). She is the 2019 Native Storytellers winner with the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Directing at Brown University/Trinity Rep.

Olga Sanchez Saltveit is Assistant Professor of Theatre for Middlebury College and Artistic Director Emerita of Milagro; her play ¡O Romeo! was created and performed during her service as its Artistic Director from 2003 until 2015. Her work as an actor/director/devisor has been seen throughout the US and in Peru, Venezuela, and Honduras. Olga served as co-artistic director of the People’s Playhouse in New York City, artistic director of Seattle Teatro Latino, and co-founder of La Casa de Artes, a Seattle-based non-profit dedicated to celebrating the beauty of Latiné arts and culture. Olga serves on the Advisory Committee for the Latinx Theatre Commons as a member of the Fornés Institute, an initiative that aims to amplify the legacy of artist and teacher María Irene Fornés. Her research centers Latiné theatre and decolonization and is published in several journals and collections, including “¡O Romeo! Shakespeare on the Altar of Día de los Muertos” found in Shakespeare and Latinidad (Edinburgh University Press, 2021). With Noe Montez, she is co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Latinx Theatre and Performance.

Adrianna M. Santos is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University–San Antonio. Santos has built her career on publications that center Chicana/x cultural production, and her work is deeply rooted in and accountable to Chicanx communities. Her forthcoming book Cicatrix Poetics, Trauma and Healing in the Literary Borderlands: Beyond Survival (Palgrave, 2023) addresses often-eclipsed legacies of colonial violence and examines Chicana survival narratives as a critical facet of social justice work. With Norma E. Cantú and Rita Urquijo-Ruiz, she is co-editor of Interplanetary Nepantla: El Mundo Zurdo 8: Selected Works from the Meeting of the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa, 2019 (Aunt Lute, 2022). She has written several articles on Chicanx literature and performance, including Borderlands Shakespeare. With Katherine Gillen and Kathryn Vomero Santos, she co-founded the Borderlands Shakespeare Colectiva, which has received funding from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Kathryn Vomero Santos is Assistant Professor of English and co-director of the Humanities Collective at Trinity University. Her cross-historical research explores the intersections of performance with the politics of language, empire, and racial formation in the early modern period and in our contemporary moment. She is currently completing a book entitled Shakespeare in Tongues (Routledge, 2024), which situates Shakespeare and his legacy within conversations about imperialism, multilingualism, and assimilation in the United States. She is also co-editing a collection of essays entitled Ethical Appropriation in Shakespearean Performance with Louise Geddes and Geoffrey Way (Edinburgh University Press, 2024). Her most recent articles examine how Borderlands artists use Shakespeare to disrupt colonial ideologies and narratives. With Katherine Gillen and Adrianna M. Santos, she co-founded the Borderlands Shakespeare Colectiva, which has received funding from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Edit Villarreal is a playwright and professor whose plays have been produced by professional and university theaters across the country and in numerous community teatros, colleges, and high schools. Born in Texas, her plays include My Visits with MGM (My Grandmother Marta), a memory play inspired by her migrant grandmother; Chicago Milagro, A Small Miracle in a Big City, about a Mexican exile turned curandero in 1895 Back of the Yards; Ice, a sci-fi melodrama featuring a Chicano family hiding their son from a totalitarian world; and The Language of Flowers, among others. Her essay “Behind Closed Doors: Sex, Lies and Servants” is published in Playing Shakespeare’s Villains, Vol. 2 and The Play’s the Thing: Selections from Shakespeare’s Characters, Vol. 1–4. Villarreal co-wrote three scripts for the award-winning series Foto-Novelas, produced by Carlos Avila and PBS. Other PBS credits include La Carpa, co-written with Avila, which aired on American Playhouse. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, she studied with legendary Cuban playwright Maria Irene Fornés at the Hispanic Playwrights Laboratory at INTAR Theatre in NYC. She is currently a faculty member at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television in the Theater Department where she serves as Vice Chair, Graduate Programs.