Nilo Cruz

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Nilo Cruz is an American playwright, the first Latino to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Born in Matanzas, Cuba in 1960, Cruz immigrated to the "Little Havana" area of Miami in 1970 on a Freedom Flight, and eventually became a US citizen. His interest in theater began with acting and directing in the early 1980s. He studied theater first at Miami-Dade Community College, later moving to New York City, where Cruz studied under fellow Cuban María Irene Fornés. Fornes recommended Cruz to Paula Vogel who was teaching at Brown University. Cruz received his M.F.A. from Brown in 1994. In 2001, he served as the playwright-in-residence for the New Theatre in Coral Gables, Florida, where he wrote Anna in the Tropics, winner of the 2003 Pulitzer and the Steinberg Award for Best New Play. A year later it received its Broadway premiere with Jimmy Smits in the lead role.

Cruz's other plays include Betty and Gauguin, Dancing on Her Knees, A Park in Our House Hortensia and the Museum of Dreams, A Bicycle Country, Night Train to Bolina, Two Sisters and a Piano, Beauty of the Father, and Lorca in a Green Dress. He has translated two plays by Federico García Lorca, Doña Rosita and The House of Bernarda Alba. He adapted a short story by Gabriel García Márquez into a children's play A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings. He also translated and adapted Pedro Calderón de la Barca's Life is a Dream which opened in February, 2007 at South Coast Repertory.

Some of the theatres that have developed and performed his works include New York’s Public Theater, New York Theatre Workshop, McCarter Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, South Coast Repertory, The Alliance, New Theatre, and the Coconut Grove Playhouse.

Cruz has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including two NEA/TCG National Theatre Artist Residency grants, a Rockefeller Foundation grant, San Francisco's W. Alton Jones award and a Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays award.

Cruz is an alumnus of New Dramatists, has taught playwriting at Brown University, the University of Iowa and atYale University. He presently lives in New York City.