Milta Ortiz is a bilingual, bicultural playwright, poet, and performer.
Background
Born in El Salvador, Ortiz emigrated to the United States during childhood and settled with her family in Northern California. She earned her MFA from Northwestern University’s Writing for the Screen & Stage program and a Creative Writing BA from San Francisco State University. In addition to writing plays, Ortiz has taught creative writing to young adults and screenwriting to undergraduates at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
Career
Works
Más. The play explores themes of identity, history, and humanity as a result of House Bill 2281 which banned Ethnic studies within classrooms in Tucson, Arizona. Más is based on a true story, and the dialogues and situations included in the play were taken from actual interviews, writings, and court documents.
Disengaged
You, Me, and Tuno. The play focuses on the dangers of food deserts and the effects it has on minority communities, as Ortiz stated:
"Good food should not be for a select few. It should be affordable and accessible to all. It’s food justice. I’m very interested in that. Food is making us sick. So many Latinos and African Americans have diabetes and at younger and younger ages".
Ortiz has been published in WritersCorps' Teachers Anthologies, Teaching Artist Journal, and has created a self-published chapbook, Encantadas with Las Manas Tres. Mirrors, written by Ortiz and published by the Teaching Artist Journal in 2011, explores what it was like for Ortiz to go from learning English just six months after emigrating to the United States at eight-years-old, to then go on to teach English as a second language to recently arrived immigrants. As Ortiz stated:
"I had to go back to that place, that feeling of being new and inside out, I had moved so far away from. Every class was a learning experience for me. Every class triggered a different memory".
Nominations
Claire Rosen and Samuel Edes Foundation Prize for Emerging Artists, 2013
Post graduate fellow in Writing for Performance at Colorado College, 2012
Awards
2006-2009: Ortiz received the following Individual Artist Grants: two from Oakland, California's Cultural Funding Program; one from the Zellerbach Family Foundation to "write and perform her solo work while in the Bay Area
2011: Last of the Lilac Roses was a finalist at Repertorio Español's Nuestras Voces playwriting contest.
She currently lives in Tucson, Arizona and is the Marketing and Outreach Director for Borderlands Theatre Company. Her husband is Marc David Pinate, the Producing Director at Borderlands. They co-founded the Hybrid Performance Experience, which is a theater troupe that performs at public spaces throughout California's Bay Area.
