Ryan Oliveira is a playwright, dramaturg, performer, and theatrical jack-of-all-trades. He is the son of two Brazilian immigrants-turned-citizens and is originally from Miami, FL. He has lived in New York City, NY and currently resides in Chicago, IL. He received his B.A. in Theatre Arts at Cornell University (2008) and his M.F.A. in Playwriting at the University of Iowa (2015).
Recent works include: The Queers Present: A Gender Reveal Party (College of Wooster, Wooster, OH, 2021); Desire in a Tinier House (Pride Films and Plays, 2019); Soccer Player in the Closet (Nothing Without a Company, 2019); Below the Pacific (The University of Iowa, 2015); and Swordplay (The University of Iowa, 2014). His short play, here (three elegies for a gay club), was part of NoPassport Theatre's Pulse Action, having been performed in London, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles throughout the fall of 2016. Publication of the Pulse Theatre Action Theatre plays is forthcoming. Another short play, Migration, was also part of NoPassport Theatre's Climate Change Theatre Action in 2017.
His work has been developed with The New Colony (Bloopsong), Teatro Vivo (Take Care), Broken Nose Theatre (Mavericks), Intrinsic Theatre Company (Fall), El Semillero (Take Care and Jellyfish Queer), Activate: Midwest (Chaos), the Sewanee Writers’ Conference (Chaos), Prop Thtr (Passing Time in Animal Town), Chicago Home Theatre Festival (A Man Walks into a Coffeeshop), Chicago Dramatists (stray), and Commission Theatre Company (Desire in a Tinier House).
Ryan has been a finalist for the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference (2020 and 2021 for Take Care), and a semi-finalist for the same conference in 2014 (The Rigel Event) and 2017 (Chaos). He has also been a finalist for the 2017 Many Voices Fellowship at the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis and the 2020 New Harmony Project Conference (Take Care). The Disquiet Luso-American Fellowship has considered Ryan a finalist in 2019 for Jellyfish Queer and a semi-finalist in 2016 for his short story, “The Strays of Piumhi”. He has also been a 2016 Romulus Linney Scholar at the Sewanee Writers' Conference.
Aside from playwriting, he has also collaborated with numerous queer theatre artists alongside Tim Miller in Exhibit Q at the New Museum in New York City in June of 2013. He has also served as producer for the 2017 and 2018 Fornés Workshops in partnership with the University of Notre Dame, as well as a performance curator and company manager for the 2017 Chicago Theatre Marathon. He has taught at the University of Iowa and DePaul University.
Ryan is also a new works dramaturg who has collaborated on productions with Teatro Bravo (Three’s a Party, 2021) and The New Colony (Merge and Punk, 2016 and 2017, respectively). Furthermore, he has served as dramaturg on a variety of new play readings, but most specifically with 16th Street Theatre (American Side Efectos and Los Tequileros, 2019). His dramaturgical foci are on audience-centric dramaturgy, structural analysis, Fornés workshop techniques, and chaos theory. Genres of interest include: Queer theory, Latinx history and identity politics, magical realism and surrealism, monsterism, video games, theatre erotics and intimacy work, utopia/dystopia, and virtual theatre/intermedia.
Ryan was a core member of ALTA, a member of El Semillero, a songwriter in Pop Magic Productions' songwriting group, and an RAC member-at-large at Chicago Dramatists. He is also a 2018-2019 Paper Trail playwright with Broken Nose Theatre Company in Chicago. He is also proud to have had stray and Desire in the House included part of Steppenwolf Theatre's The Mix, highlighting plays with diverse casts seeking further development and production throughout the United States.
What are his favorite plays? New works. But the older stuff: 4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane; As Five Years Pass by Federica Garcia Lorca; The American Pilot by David Greig; How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel; and Mad Forest by Caryl Churchill.