ABSTRACT

Marissa Chibas is a writer and performer. She is the recipient of the 2015 TCG Fox Fellowship in Distinguished Achievement. Her solo performance, Daughter of a Cuban Revolutionary, produced by the CalArts Center for New Performance (CNP), has toured the U.S., Europe, and Mexico. For CNP, Marissa coadapted the award-winning production of Gertrude Stein’s Brewsie and Willie and played Edgar in King Lear, a production that toured to the Frictions Festival in France. Marissa has acted in over 50 productions and two dozen American premieres, including The Keening, by Umberto Dorado, at the ART in Cambridge, Two Sisters and a Piano, by Nilo Cruz, at the McCarter, and The Mark Taper Forum productions of The House of Bernarda Alba and Eduardo Machado’s The Floating Island Plays. On Broadway, she performed in Abe Lincoln in Illinois and Brighton Beach Memoirs, as well as off Broadway and in many prominent resident theaters, including Arena Stage, Alley Theater, and the Yale Repertory Theatre. Her silent film/performance piece, Clara’s Los Angeles, was presented at REDCAT’s NOW FEST and the San Diego Latino Film Festival. Marissa is on the Theater School faculty at CalArts where she heads Duende CalArts, a CNP initiative that collaborates with innovative Latin@ and Latin American artists to create adventurous performance. For Duende, she conceived and wrote Shelter, which premiered in April 2016 in Los Angeles and was subsequently performed at the Kennedy Center. Shelter focuses on the Central American unaccompanied children who are seeking asylum in the U.S. She is working on a performance piece entitled The Second Woman, opening in the fall of 2016 at the Bootleg Theater in Los Angeles.