Artist Statement
I grew up in South Florida as a daughter of immigrant parents from Costa Rica.
I was raised far from my extended family, but my parents made sure I never lost touch with the culture we came from. They built a close-knit Latine community in Florida that became a second family to me, and every summer, they made it a priority to take me back to Costa Rica. These visits helped me hold on to my culture and language, ensuring that I carried these roots with me wherever I went. But it wasn’t until I left home and moved to New York City that I realized how disjointed my personal identity was to my artistic identity. I couldn’t communicate my artistry in Spanish to the same depths that I could in English. I sought to change that, incorporating Spanish Studies into my formation as an artist so that I would have the tools to express myself in my family’s native language, creating art defined by my bilingual immigrant experiences.
It is vital to my artistic practice as a director and theatre artist to express the ways I view the world as a first generation latine immigrant to the US.
I am driven by my desire to tell the story of my family and my community, elevating the ordinary stories of the people that make life on this earth special. I am drawn to the theatre because of its power to make the ordinary extraordinary. I am interested in the exploration of the magical, as tied to subconscious emotional experience, that the inherent theatricality in performance permits. The injection of the fantastical into the ordinary helps us understand different aspects of the human experience. Through this lens, I want to honor the stories of those who came before me, of my ancestors whose hard work has allowed me to be who I am today.
I work on Latine stories broadly because those are the narratives that excite me, even when they are not my own.
This community has so much joy, and I want to find ways to share that with those outside of it, sharing the richness of cultures that I grew up with in South Florida. I’m from Costa Rica, but I feel distinctly Latine: a combination of cultures that make me feel at home. I also have a strong interest in interrogating the way that language works in performance as the way that we build meaning in our world.
As a bilingual artist, my experiences are defined by both languages.
There are words that exist in Spanish that don’t exist in English and vice versa. These different words shape the way I understand my experiences, and they affect the way I tell my stories. I am drawn to the connection between performance and translation, as two acts of transforming meaning, one from page to stage and the other across time and space. For millennia we have used storytelling and language to help us make sense of the world around us. Both have a vested interest in exploring the way we build meaning and interpret our lives. I am constantly interrogating my own approach to bilingual theatre, integrating it into my practice in a fuller way, and making translation and bilingual work more accessible to everyone, not just Spanish speakers.
Bio
Sofia is a Costa Rican, New York-based theatre artist and administrator. She graduated from Fordham University with a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre with a concentration in Directing, and Spanish Studies, summa cum laude. During her time at Fordham, she dedicated herself to producing Latine or Spanish-language playwrights, with a passion for bilingual performance and translation for performance.
Her Spanish Studies thesis titled “New Methods for Translation and Performance of the Spanish Golden Age: A Case Study of a Virtual Production of Ana Caro’s Valor, agravio y mujer” explored the ways new media and performance complete the translation act when staging a Spanish-language play to an English-speaking audience. She hopes to continue these research efforts in her creative and academic work to find new and better forms of translating plays and presenting bilingual work in order to increase the reach and accessibility of the Spanish-langauge canon in the United States. She was also one of the founding members of the Fordham Theatre BIPOC Alliance, created in Summer of 2020 to advocate for the BIPOC theatre students. Since its founding, the Alliance secured intimacy and anti-racism training for the entire theatre department, faculty, staff, and students, and has created a community where the BIPOC students can feel safe. The alliance continues to advocate for change.
Since graduation, she has focused on the development of new work as a director, especially from Latine writers. She has worked on several staged readings and workshop productions, as well as experimental short form theatre works. She is passionate about working with playwrights to bring their words to life and investigate different modes of storytelling.
She has also honed her skills as a arts administrator, working in fundraising for both a large Broadway not-for-profit and a small, start-up new work development organization. She also has experience with arts education and new work development, helping support the next generation of theatre artists. She is excited to begin a new chapter in the Fall of 2025, where she will begin her MFA in Directing from Northwestern University.