Esperanza Rosales Balcárcel (she/they) is a trans Guatemalan playwright and educator, born in Guatemala City and raised in Norwalk, CT.

Her works are spiritual, hypertheatrical choreographic narratives that give Queer and Trans BIPOC voices a space to interrogate core wounds and offer them a path towards healing.

Esperanza’s plays have been supported by TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, Roundabout Theatre, Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, the Stanford Department of Theater and Performance Studies, the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, the Kennedy Center, the Breaking the Binary Theatre Festival, The Tank, and New York Theater Workshop. Esperanza is the recipient of the Princeton Ward Prize for Fiction and Outstanding Achievement in Theater Prize, the Eugene O'Neill Memorial Scholarship from the Yale School of Drama, and the Paul Greene Award from the National Theatre Conference. Her play, Color Boy, received the Kennedy Center's Latinx Playwriting Award and Paula Vogel Playwriting Award (finalist), an Honorable Mention from the 2024 Relentless Award, a nomination for the 2025 Venturous Playwright Fellowship from the Playwright’s Center, and was named the Connecticut State Winner for the Clauder Prize from Portland Stage. Her play Lupe Finds Me in the Garden of Dreams was a finalist for the Leah Ryan Prize, the O’Neill Playwrights Conference, and the Van Lier Fellowship for New Voices at Rattlestick Theater. Lupe Finds Me was developed through New York Theater Workshop’s 2024 Summer Dartmouth Residency, and was presented at the 2024 Breaking the Binary Theatre Festival at Playwrights Horizons. She is a two-time nominee for the Ollie Award and finalist for the O’Neill Theatre Conference, a one-time nominee for the Weissberger New Play Award and the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and is a contributor to the second volume of Methuen Drama’s Anthology of Trans Plays.

Along with writing, Esperanza has a passion for producing new works by Queer BIPOC artists. She was one of the 2022 Producing Artistic Directors of the Yale Summer Cabaret, where their collective commissioned and produced an entire season of new plays by Queer BIPOC writers from the New Haven community, including Maia Novi’s Invasive Species (Vineyard Theater), a.k. payne’s BurnBabyBurn: An American Dream (Atlantic Theater Company), m. imani west’s fuckin’ loud (Hollywood Fringe Festival), Rudi Goblen’s Ser Humano and yao pang’s ARLO. Her monologue, Soledad’s Journey, was featured in Breaking the Binary Theatre Festival’s Bliss: A Collection Commissioned Scenes and Monologues, where it was performed by Indya Moore at the Public Theater.

She is currently a Teaching Artist for the Public Theater, an IB Theater Advisor at Brooklyn Prospect Charter High School, and a Lecturer in Playwriting at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, where she produced and mentored the playwrights working on the 2024 Carlotta Festival and the Langston Hughes Festival of New Plays.

BA: Princeton, MFA: Yale.

Esperanza is currently unrepresented, and her email is ezperanzarises@gmail.com (with a z at the beginning, not an s. She apologizes for the potential missed emails brought on by this typo).

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