About Veramendi

Portrait-Veramendi-2017-web

AWARDS, HONORS, AND PUBLICATIONS

Recipient of the Norma Elia Cantú Creative Writing Award from Chicana/Latina Studies Journal and the Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social, 2022

Excerpt of Santuario|Sanctuary published in Chicana/Latina Studies Journal, Fall/Winter 2022-23

Co-recipient of Boedecker Foundation Path to Excellence Grant, 2017

Published in Naropa Summer Writing Program DIY Guerilla Magazine, poetry, prose and drawings, 2016

Co-recipient of Puffin Foundation Grant, 2008

Screenplay Finalist in Moondance Film Festival, 2007

Co-recipient of Evanston Cultural Fund Grant, 2007

Teresa Veramendi is a multidisciplinary theatre artist, performer, community facilitator, award-winning playwright, and educator who utilizes the arts as a tool to interrupt social inequities and rehumanize the other. Writing, producing, directing, and performing her own work over the last twenty years, she manifests her political interrogations of gender, class, nationality, and climate change into visually poetic, documentary, and historical theatre projects that embrace magical realism. Her expertise lies in her dedication to devised and experimental theatre, body-mind awareness practices, psychophysical acting, and the internationally popular social theatre practice, Theatre of the Oppressed.

Since co-founding Theatre of the Oppressed Chicago in 2012, Veramendi has facilitated over one hundred and fifty Theatre of the Oppressed workshops on diverse topics such as class, gender, race, immigration, public education, intersectionality, internalized oppression, electoral politics, and career transitions, in various settings and cities around the country.

In 2018, she was a co-recipient of the Boedecker Foundation Path to Excellence Grant to support the development and production of Santuario|Sanctuary, an original bilingual, documentary-style theatre piece following the parallel and divergent experiences of youth and monarch butterflies on their migrations across the USA-Mexico border.

In 2022, she was awarded the Norma Elia Cantú Creative Writing Award from Chicana/Latina Studies Journal and the Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social for an excerpt of her script, Santuario|Sanctuary.

As an educator, she has led courses at St. Lawrence University and San Jose State University. She has been invited on multiple occasions as a guest facilitator of Theatre of the Oppressed at Regis University, University of Illinois-Chicago, Colorado State University, University of Chicago, and Naropa University.

Her work has been performed in Boulder, Chicago, New York, Lima, and Buenos Aires. Veramendi currently lives in San Jose, California with her husband J. Michael Martinez, and their two cats.