Kristoffer Diaz

Kristoffer Díaz is an American playwright, screenwriter, and educator. As a playwright, he has five full-length titles amongst other works which have been widely produced and developed. In 2011, The New York Times awarded Díaz with the Outstanding Playwright Award. He has worked with television networks like HBO, FX, Fox, ESPN, and Netflix. Díaz currently teaches at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study.[1]

Kristoffer Díaz
OccupationPlaywright, screenwriter, educator
ResidenceBrooklyn, New York
NationalityAmerican
EducationNew York University (BA) (MFA)
Yale University (MFA)


Theater

Notable Involvement

Díaz is a resident play-wright for Teatro Vista, a non-profit theater company committed to advocating for and tending to LatinX culture.[2] For Teatro Vista's 2008–2009 season, Díaz co-produced with Victory Gardens Theater and debuted his play The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity world-wide. His next world premiere with Teatro Vista was The Upstairs Concierge, a farcical comedy produced by Goodman Theatre in the 2014–2015 season.[3] Later in 2015, Díaz was the first recipient of the New Playwright Residency Program Award from Temple University and commissioned to write a play for the Department of Theater. Díaz also collaborated directly with staff and the student body, ”conducting master classes for students in the MFA playwriting program and observing the work of the MFA acting students”.[4] In 2017, Díaz received a Tisch School of the Arts Dean's Faculty Grant to conduct research at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics conference.[1] He is recognized as an alumni playwright for New Dramatists from 2011–2018.[5] In addition, Díaz co-founded the Unit Collective and is a recipient of the Jerome Fellowship, the Future Aesthetics Artist Regrant, inaugural Gail Merrifield Papp Fellowship, and the Van Lier Fellowship.[6]

Works

Kristoffer Díaz has written short work for The 24 Hour Plays and The 24 Hour Musicals on Broadway. He co-wrote Brink!, a full-length play featured in the Humana Festival of New American Plays in 2009. Other plays include Things With Friends, Swag (or Fucking Vigwan), #therevolution, Guernica, Rebecca Oaxaca Lays Down a Bunt, and Going Left. Díaz's most highly awarded play is The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity as it qualified him as a Pulitzer Prize finalist.[7]

Full Length Plays:

Welcome to Arroyo's is a piece that locates of Latinas and Latinos in the role of hip-hop culture. It premiered at the American Theater Company in Chicago on April 15, 2010, and was directed by Jamie Castañeda Welcome to Arroyo's was featured in the Hi-Arts Hip-hop theater festival. This play tells the story of a Puerto Rican family living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The teenage daughter, Molly, commits herself to the graffiti elements of hip-hop culture, which causes a conflict in values between her and her brother.[11] The play is narrated by a DJ and MC chorus, who incorporate elements hip-hop and spoken word poetry to comment on the action.[12][10]

Awards
  • 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama — Finalist
  • 2011 Lucille Lortel Awards for Outstanding Play — Winner
  • 2011 OBIE Award, Best New American Play — Winner
  • 2011 New York Times Outstanding Playwright Award — Winner[6]

Television

Díaz has written series’ pilots for HBO and FX and was the editor for Season 1 of GLOW, an original television show on Netflix. He adapted a Jonathan Larson musical called RENT into a partially live show Rent: Live for Fox. For ESPN, Díaz wrote "The Butt Fumble: A One-Man Play".[13][7][5]

References
  1. https://gallatin.nyu.edu/people/faculty/kkd2000.html
  2. https://www.teatrovista.org/history-mission
  3. https://www.teatrovista.org/production-history
  4. https://tfma.temple.edu/news/new-playwright-residency-program-established
  5. https://newdramatists.org/kristoffer-diaz
  6. https://www.samuelfrench.com/a/295/kristoffer-diaz
  7. https://newplayexchange.org/users/211/kristoffer-diaz
  8. Díaz, Kristoffer (2012). The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity. Samuel French.
  9. Díaz, Kristoffer (2013). The Unfortunates. Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
  10. Díaz, Kristoffer (2011). Welcome to Arroyo's. New York: Dramatists Play Service.
  11. Banks, Daniel. Say Word!: Voices from Hip Hop Theater: An Anthology. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan, 2011. Print.
  12. Diaz, Kristoffer. Welcome to Arroyo's. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2011.
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