MEET CARMELITA TROPICANA
“I love exchanging ideas with artists of different generations and passing on some of my experiences.”
Location: New York, New York
Disciplines: Theater, Playwriting, Zines/book arts
Carmelita Tropicana (aka Alina Troyano) is a writer and performer who straddles the worlds of performance art and theater and uses irreverent humor and fantasy as subversive tools to challenge cultural stereotypes and rewrite history from multiple perspectives. By performing hyperbolic feminine and masculine personas, as well as numerous animals, insects, and fantasy creatures, she challenges historical and narrative authority.
She began devising work with her long-time collaborators Ela Troyano and Uzi Parnes creating multimedia spectacles and reviews. Her most recent work Give me Carmelita Tropicana! was a critically acclaimed theater collaboration with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins produced by Soho Rep in 2024.
Tropicana has been the sole author of of works including a podcast memoir commissioned by Soho Rep titled That’s Not What Happened, Milk of Amnesia, a much published solo included in the Handbook of LatinX Art and The Drama Review, the futuristic play Chicas 2000, and With What Ass Does a Cockroach Sit? published in Animal Acts: Performing Species Today.
Tropicana’s work has been written about in the academy beginning with queer theorist Jose Esteban Munoz in his seminal book Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics with an essay highlighting the collaboration of Ela Troyano and Carmelita Tropicana titled Sisters Act.
In addition, Tropicana’s work also appears in art publications: Arte No Es Vida, Actions by Artists of the Americas 1960-2000 and Radical Conventions–Cuban American Art from the 1980’s.
Select venues where her work has been produced/presented include: Soho Rep Theater (New York) Institute of Contemporary Art (London), the Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin), INTAR Theater (New York) and PS 122 (New York). Select awards/fellowships include: US Latin X Fellowship, United States Artists Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Creative Capital Grant, MacDowell Residency, Park Avenue Armory Residency, Anonymous Was a Woman, and an Obie award.
Her book I, Carmelita Tropicana, Performing Between Cultures is a compilation of scripts, performances, short stories and was published by Beacon Press. She was coeditor with Jill Dolan and Holly Hughes of Memories of the Revolution: The First Ten Years of the Wow Café Theater.
She serves on the Board of Directors of the New York Foundation for the Arts and Soho Rep Theater and is a member of Actors Equity and the Dramatist Guild. Learn more at her website.
Work
mentor profile
What interests you about mentoring?
“I love exchanging ideas with artists of different generations and passing on some of my experiences which may or may not be relevant but worthy of discussing. I have taught at many universities like NYU at their Performance Studies Dept. and at Harvard's Theater Dance Media Department and found it invigorating and quite rich to help students devise their own work. I also mentored at the Atlantic Arts Center and loved it with mentees that were visual artists, writers, performers, playwrights all of different ages.”
Given your experience and interests, what kind of emerging artist do you feel best positioned to support?
“Performers, writers ofperformance and theater. Mentees interested in exploring the many aspects of creating work and the joys and challenges of the collaborative process.”
As a mentor, what would you like to offer an emerging artist? What would you like to receive?
“I offer my POV and hope to receive their POV with respect to age, where they were born, their sexuality, gender, ethnicity, astrological sign in a trusting safe environment.”
Have you had mentors of your own? Who have they been?
“I regard Irene Fornes, playwright and teacher as a possibly mentor and the Split Britches company was a source of inspiration when I began devising work.”
This Mentor is open to working with Fellows either remotely or in-person!