Roberto Gutiérrez Varea is a stage director, researcher, and academic working at the intersection of performance and violent social conflict.
Roberto Gutiérrez Varea began his career in theater in his native Argentina. His research and creative work focus is on live performance as means of resistance and peacebuilding in the context of social conflict and state violence. Varea’s stage work in the United States spans four decades and includes directing premieres of works by Latine playwrights such as Manuel Puig, Migdalia Cruz, Maria Fornés, Ariel Dorfman, Cherríe Moraga, and José Rivera, among many others. His community-based work includes the founding of Soapstone Theatre Company, a collective of formerly incarcerated men and women survivors of violent crime, El Teatro Jornalero!, a performance company focusing on the experience of Latin American immigrant workers, and currently, serving as founding member of La Lengua Teatro en Español. He is a regular contributor and editor to international journals in performance and peacebuilding such as emisférica (NYU, US), Peace Review (Routledge, US), Contemporary Theater Review (Routledge, UK), Revista Conjunto (Cuba), and Revista Heterotopías (Argentina) where he also sits on the Editorial Board. Roberto is co-editor and co-author of the two-volume anthology “Acting Together: Performance and the Creative Transformation of Conflict” (New Village Press, Oakland-NYC) as well as a contributor to several books on performance studies. He has been the recipient of major grants and awards including the San Francisco Arts Commission, the California Arts Council, Creative Capital, and the MAP Fund. He is a member of the Steering Committee of Theater Without Borders and serves on the Advisory Board of San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Gardens Festival and Middle East-focused Golden Thread Productions. Varea is a Full Professor and founding faculty of the University of San Francisco’s Critical Diversity Studies Program and the Performing Arts and Social Justice Department, where he currently serves as Chair.