Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, 2016 MacArthur Fellow, New York, New York, September 6, 2016

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

Brooklyn, NY

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is a Brooklyn-based playwright, producer, Tony winner, and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist.  Recent theater credits include Appropriate (Broadway), Purpose (Steppenwold Theater) The Comeuppance (Signature Theatre), Girls (Yale Rep), Everybody (Signature Theatre), War (Yale Rep; Lincoln Center/LCT3), Gloria (Vineyard Theatre), Appropriate (Obie Award; Signature Theatre), An Octoroon (Obie Award; Soho Rep, Theatre for a New Audience), and Neighbors (The Public Theater). He currently teaches at Yale University and serves as Vice President of the Dramatists Guild council and on the boards of Soho Rep, Park Avenue Armory, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and the Dramatists Guild Foundation.  Honors include a USA Artists fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, the MacArthur fellowship, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Drama, and the inaugural Tennessee Williams Award.  


Events

Collaborator

Alina Troyano, aka Carmelita Tropicana is a Cuban born, New York based writer, performer and educator.

Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!


Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is a Brooklyn-based playwright, producer, Tony winner, and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist. 

Artist Bio

Alina Troyano, aka Carmelita Tropicana is a Cuban born, New York based writer, performer and educator.

Artist Bio

A My Dinner With Andre-style debate with compare-and-contrast performances delivered throughout, Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! touches on how art relates to history and history relates to art, updating it through the artists’ personal histories and experiences. While the two artists share a number of aesthetic and thematic concerns—identity, belonging, the nature of history and storytelling—the work that they make and the context in which they make it could not be more different. Since the 1980s, Carmelita has worked on the fringes of a “mainstream,” which has very little room for queer artists of color, whereas Branden, whose works have appeared at The Public Theater, has directly profited from funding structures geared towards the encouragement of “minority” voices, something virtually unheard of 25 years ago.

Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! premiered at Soho Repertory Theater on October 24, 2024.


Discipline
Performance Art
Award Year
2016
Status

In Progress

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Carmelita Tropicana

New York, NY

Alina Troyano, aka Carmelita Tropicana is a Cuban born, New York based writer, performer and educator. Tropicana uses irreverent humor to challenge cultural stereotypes, performing feminine and masculine personas, animals, insects, cyborgs, and hybrid fantasy creatures. She’s currently working on Live Memoir, (2025). She’s received a Latinx Artist Fellowship (2022); United States Artists Fellowship (2021); John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2017); and awards from Creative Capital (2016); Anonymous Was a Woman (2005); New York Foundation for the Arts (1987, 1991, 2006) and an Obie (1999). Her writing appears in her book I, Carmelita Tropicana, Performing Between Cultures (2000), a collection of scripts, short stories, essays and she is an editor on Memories of the Revolution: The First Ten Years of the Wow Café Theater (2015). She serves on the New York Foundation for the Arts Board of Directors, Soho Rep Board of Directors, and is a member of the Dramatist Guild.


Events

Collaborator

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is a Brooklyn-based playwright, producer, Tony winner, and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist.