Cara Mia Theatre Co.

Cara Mía Theatre Co. is a non-profit theater company that presents live accessible theatre by producing critically acclaimed published plays and creating new and experimental works while developing innovative and educational youth arts programming reflective of the Latino experience in the U.S.

In 1996, Cara Mía Theatre Co. filled a void in the Dallas arts community by becoming the first Dallas theater to focus on the Mexican-American experience. Cara Mía assured Mexican-American audiences that their bilingual and bicultural experiences were represented regularly on Dallas stages. Co-Founder, Eliberto Gonzales sites the San Antonio book fair as a catalyst for founding Cara Mía Theatre Co. Feeling that Latino literature and its writers ought to be more accessible to the public, he began a theatre company. Along with Adelina Anthony, Eliberto founded the company as a vehicle to bring the Chicano/ Latino US experience expressed in literature to the public. Since that time, the cultural breadth of CMTC’s plays expanded over the years, the company’s artistic approach has matured, especially since the arrival of current Executive Artistic Director David Lozano in 2002. To expand the company’s reach to non-theatre going Latinos, Lozano chose to focus on creating new bilingual plays that were both topical and theatrically unique. Trained in physical theatre, Lozano formed a resident artistic ensemble that began to devise new works inspired by international forms of physical theatre such as clown and mask performance, poetic movement and collectively created plays that simultaneously speak to the experiences of the local Latino community in Dallas. Today, CMTC boasts of a 19-member resident artistic ensemble that creates new works and also produces classic plays by the most acclaimed Latino playwrights in the nation. Cara Mía Theatre Co. celebrates its 20th anniversary during the 2015-2016 season.

Cara Mía has become a cultural resource in Dallas and North Texas, producing world premieres of major Mexican-American writers such as Sandra Cisneros, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and Cherrie Morraga. Cara Mía has also produced original plays written collectively by the artistic ensemble and by local Dallas writers that have received critical acclaim from Dallas-Fort Worth media.