( 1958- )
Migdalia Cruz was raised in the South Bronx by working-class Puerto Rican parents. She attended Stuyvesant High School in New York and went to Lake Erie College in Ohio where she received a BFA, magna cum laude, in 1980. She earned an MFA in playwriting from Columbia University in 1984. From 1984 to 1990, she was nurtured in the International Arts Relations' (INTAR) Hispanic-Playwrights-in-Residence Laboratory, where she worked under Maria Irene Fornes. Cruz credits this experience as the time when she "learned to tell the truth" in her writing.
Cruz has taught playwriting at Princeton University and Amherst College and has guest lectured at Yale University, Wesleyan University, Mount Holyoke College, and Columbia University. In 1988 she received a McKnight Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Playwriting Fellowship for 1990-91. She was awarded the Clara Rotter Fellowship for a New Dramatist at the Royal Court Theatre in London, England, in 1994.
Migdalia Cruz recently completed her first teleplay, How!?, and is working on commissions from the Arena Stage ( Washington, D.C.), the Working Theatre ( New York), a play about Lolita Lebron (the Puerto Rican independence movement heroine) for the Latino Chicago Theatre ( Chicago), and the film version of her one-act play Dreams of Home. She is a member of the New Dramatists and currently resides in New Canaan, Connecticut.
Migdalia Cruz's work is described as startling and uncompromising. Her highly charged images are both theatrically powerful and emotionally compel-
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