Andrea Thome is a Chilean/Costa Rican-American playwright who grew up navigating the multiple landscapes and languages that inhabit her plays. Her play Pinkolandia received a rolling world premiere at INTAR Theater (NYC), Austin’s Salvage Vanguard Theater, Two River Theater (NJ), and 16th Street Theater (Chicago). It was awarded the Lark/Mellon Foundation’s Launching New Plays Fellowship, and was translated into Russian and presented at Moscow’s Meyerhold Center. Other current plays in progress include Purgatorio (developed through SPACE on Ryder Farm and Keen Company), and an untitled play about an 11th-century astronomer from Muslim Spain, commissioned by Ensemble Studio Theatre/The Sloan Foundation.

Andrea’s playwriting often experiments with the nature of theatrical collaboration. She was recently commissioned by En Garde Arts to write Undocumented, created from her interviews and ongoing conversations with undocumented immigrants. Collaborating with composer Sinuhé Padilla-Isunza and director José Zayas, they shared a developmental reading at Joe’s Pub (at the Public Theater) in November 2017, and are in the process of developing a full-length version in conversation with both theaters and community organizations. For the Public Theater, Andrea created Troy in collaboration with director Laurie Woolery and Public Works’ ACTivate Ensemble. This year and a half-long process, in which the community ensemble helped generate and also performed the material, culminated in a full production at the Public in June 2016. She has also been developing a unique collaborative process with director Lisa Rothe, composer Amir Khosrowpour and a collaborating ensemble of performers and storytellers to create a multidisciplinary, musical piece, The Necklace of the Dove. Weaving together stories about love from a medieval Muslim Spanish book and a modern immigrant community in Queens, the piece has been developed through Mabou Mines’ Resident Artist Program, Fulcrum Theater, The Lark and New Georges’ Audrey Residency.

Andrea’s other plays include Undone (Whitman Award; developed at Queens College, Victory Gardens, Lark), Worm Girl (Cherry Red Productions), various short plays and many collaborative projects. Her play translations (including Guillermo Calderón’s Neva) have been produced by the Public Theater, CTG, La Jolla Playhouse and others. She co-created and has directed the Lark’s México-US Playwright Exchange Program since 2006, which brings together Mexican and US playwrights to create theatrical translations of new Mexican plays and build lasting collaborative relationships and dialogue. Andrea co-founded fulana, an all-Latina satire collective that creates cutting-edge political & cultural parodies online and beyond (www.fulana.org), and she spent 5 formative years in San Francisco, where her Red Rocket Theater Company created and produced an original play each month, and where she worked with artists including Latina Theatre Lab, Campo Santo, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Brava.

She has received fellowships and residencies from NYFA, MacDowell Colony (awarded Thornton Wilder fellowship), New Voices/New York, the Camargo Foundation, Blue Mountain Center, SPACE on Ryder Farm’s Working Farm group, the City of Oakland, New York University (MFA Fellow), Women’s Project Lab, and Keen Company. Andrea was a New Dramatists resident playwright from 2009-2016.