Community hub
Recent from talks
Knowledge base stats:
Talk channels stats:
Members stats:
Tanya Saracho
Tanya Selene Saracho is a Mexican-American actress, playwright, dramaturge and screenwriter. With a background in theater before writing for television, she co-founded Teatro Luna in 2000 and was its co-artistic director for ten years. She also co-founded the Alliance of Latinx Theater Artists (ALTA) of Chicago. She is particularly known for centering the "Latina gaze". She developed and was showrunner of the Starz series Vida, which ran for three seasons (2018–2020). Saracho signed a three-year development deal with Starz in February 2018.
Tanya Selene Saracho was born in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, Mexico, to Ramiro A. Saracho, head customs officer with the Servicio de Administración Tributaria and a powerful figure in the conservative Institutional Revolutionary Party, and Rosalina Armenta. After her parents' divorce, her childhood was split between Reynosa, Tamaulipas, where her father lived, and just across the border in McAllen, Texas, where she and her mother chose to reside together with her two younger sisters Tatiana Saracho and Fresy Saracho. Both cities are part of the bi-national Reynosa–McAllen metropolitan area straddling the Rio Grande (Spanish: Río Bravo del Norte). She and her family-members went back and forth between Mexico and the United States often — with her father commuting over the border in 2008. She attended middle and high school in McAllen and enrolled in Boston University College of Fine Arts to study theater, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.
Saracho has said that a goal of her work is to provide representation for Latinx people and address stereotypes. Her career started in 1998 when she moved to Chicago.[excessive citations] Saracho initially attempted to work as an actress, but found that her opportunities as a Latina were limited to typecast roles as maids or sex workers. She would form Teatro Luna with Coya Paz in June 2000.[excessive citations] The group had an original ensemble of 10 Latina women from diverse backgrounds.[tone]
Saracho took part in the creation of numerous works through Teatro Luna, including Machos, Dejame Contarte (Let Me Tell You), The María Chronicles and S-E-X-Oh!. Machos is a play examining "contemporary masculinities", drawn from interviews with 50 men across the U.S. and performed by the all-Latina cast in drag, which earned 2 Non-Equity Jeff Awards.
Saracho parted with the group in January 2010 to focus on playwriting. The same year, she co-founded The Alliance of Latinx Theater Artists (ALTA) of Chicago,[excessive citations] which describes itself as "a service organization dedicated to furthering the Chicago Latinx Theater movement by promoting, educating, representing, and unifying Latinx-identified artists and their allies".
Multiple plays that she worked on in this time received nominations for the Jeff Award. She also worked as an outside actor on occasion during her time at Teatro Luna.
One of her first works after leaving Teatro Luna was El Nogalar for the Goodman Theatre, co-produced with Teatro Vista, as a reconstruction of Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard set in the pecan orchards of Northern Mexico amid the drug wars,[excessive citations] which ran at the Goodman Theatre from March 26 to April 24, 2011. At that time, she was resident playwright emeritus at Chicago Dramatists, resident playwright at Teatro Vista, a Goodman Theatre Fellow at the Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media at Columbia College Chicago and an artistic associate with Chicago's LGBTQ-oriented About Face Theatre. She was also then working on two Andrew W. Mellon Foundation commissions for Steppenwolf Theatre, an adaptation of a Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz play for Oregon Shakespeare Festival called The Tenth Muse, and a historical fiction piece for About Face Theatre called The Good Private. The latter, about a transgender soldier in the American Civil War, was inspired by the story of Albert Cashier, assigned female at birth in Ireland but who lived out his life in Illinois as a man after fighting for the Union Army. In late 2012, her play Song for the Disappeared about an estranged borderland family brought together by the disappearance of their younger brother, was performed at the Goodman Theatre.
Her 2014 work also included Mala Hierba at the Second Stage Uptown and Hushabye as part of Steppenwolf's First Look in 2014. Saracho's additional involvements include being a member of The Kilroys' List and founding the Ñ Project. Saracho is also a member of SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild of America West and has worked as a voice-over actress.
Hub AI
Tanya Saracho AI simulator
(@Tanya Saracho_simulator)
Tanya Saracho
Tanya Selene Saracho is a Mexican-American actress, playwright, dramaturge and screenwriter. With a background in theater before writing for television, she co-founded Teatro Luna in 2000 and was its co-artistic director for ten years. She also co-founded the Alliance of Latinx Theater Artists (ALTA) of Chicago. She is particularly known for centering the "Latina gaze". She developed and was showrunner of the Starz series Vida, which ran for three seasons (2018–2020). Saracho signed a three-year development deal with Starz in February 2018.
Tanya Selene Saracho was born in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, Mexico, to Ramiro A. Saracho, head customs officer with the Servicio de Administración Tributaria and a powerful figure in the conservative Institutional Revolutionary Party, and Rosalina Armenta. After her parents' divorce, her childhood was split between Reynosa, Tamaulipas, where her father lived, and just across the border in McAllen, Texas, where she and her mother chose to reside together with her two younger sisters Tatiana Saracho and Fresy Saracho. Both cities are part of the bi-national Reynosa–McAllen metropolitan area straddling the Rio Grande (Spanish: Río Bravo del Norte). She and her family-members went back and forth between Mexico and the United States often — with her father commuting over the border in 2008. She attended middle and high school in McAllen and enrolled in Boston University College of Fine Arts to study theater, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.
Saracho has said that a goal of her work is to provide representation for Latinx people and address stereotypes. Her career started in 1998 when she moved to Chicago.[excessive citations] Saracho initially attempted to work as an actress, but found that her opportunities as a Latina were limited to typecast roles as maids or sex workers. She would form Teatro Luna with Coya Paz in June 2000.[excessive citations] The group had an original ensemble of 10 Latina women from diverse backgrounds.[tone]
Saracho took part in the creation of numerous works through Teatro Luna, including Machos, Dejame Contarte (Let Me Tell You), The María Chronicles and S-E-X-Oh!. Machos is a play examining "contemporary masculinities", drawn from interviews with 50 men across the U.S. and performed by the all-Latina cast in drag, which earned 2 Non-Equity Jeff Awards.
Saracho parted with the group in January 2010 to focus on playwriting. The same year, she co-founded The Alliance of Latinx Theater Artists (ALTA) of Chicago,[excessive citations] which describes itself as "a service organization dedicated to furthering the Chicago Latinx Theater movement by promoting, educating, representing, and unifying Latinx-identified artists and their allies".
Multiple plays that she worked on in this time received nominations for the Jeff Award. She also worked as an outside actor on occasion during her time at Teatro Luna.
One of her first works after leaving Teatro Luna was El Nogalar for the Goodman Theatre, co-produced with Teatro Vista, as a reconstruction of Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard set in the pecan orchards of Northern Mexico amid the drug wars,[excessive citations] which ran at the Goodman Theatre from March 26 to April 24, 2011. At that time, she was resident playwright emeritus at Chicago Dramatists, resident playwright at Teatro Vista, a Goodman Theatre Fellow at the Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media at Columbia College Chicago and an artistic associate with Chicago's LGBTQ-oriented About Face Theatre. She was also then working on two Andrew W. Mellon Foundation commissions for Steppenwolf Theatre, an adaptation of a Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz play for Oregon Shakespeare Festival called The Tenth Muse, and a historical fiction piece for About Face Theatre called The Good Private. The latter, about a transgender soldier in the American Civil War, was inspired by the story of Albert Cashier, assigned female at birth in Ireland but who lived out his life in Illinois as a man after fighting for the Union Army. In late 2012, her play Song for the Disappeared about an estranged borderland family brought together by the disappearance of their younger brother, was performed at the Goodman Theatre.
Her 2014 work also included Mala Hierba at the Second Stage Uptown and Hushabye as part of Steppenwolf's First Look in 2014. Saracho's additional involvements include being a member of The Kilroys' List and founding the Ñ Project. Saracho is also a member of SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild of America West and has worked as a voice-over actress.