About me
Carmen Aguirre (she/her) is an award-winning theatre artist and bestselling author. She was born in Santiago, Chile to parents who were teachers and activists. After spending much of her teenage years and early adulthood in South America working for the underground resistance movement against the Pinochet dictatorship, Carmen returned to Vancouver in 1990 to attend Studio 58, where she was in the same class as The Electric Company. It was while attending theatre school that she wrote her first play, In a Land Called I Don’t Remember. Since then, much of her writing has been autobiographical and unabashedly left wing, exploring themes of exile, loss, alienation, and isolation. Carmen has written and co-written over twenty-five plays, including Chile Con Carne, The Refugee Hotel, The Trigger, Blue Box, Broken Tailbone, Anywhere But Here, and adaptations for the stage of Eduardo Galeano’s and Julio Cortazar’s work. She co-adapted and starred in Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands with the Electric Company. Currently, Carmen is adapting Euripides’ Medea at Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach and Moliere’s The Learned Ladies, which was commissioned by Toronto’s Factory Theatre. Her new play with Electric Company Fire Never Dies: The Tina Modotti Project will premiere at the 2024 Chutzpah! Festival. She is the author of the international bestseller Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter (winner of Canada Reads 2012) and its bestselling sequel Mexican Hooker #1 and My Other Roles Since the Revolution. Carmen is the recipient of the Hispanic Business Alliance’s 2014 Ten Most Influential Hispanics in Canada Award, Latincouver’s 2014 Most Inspirational Latin Award, the 2014 Betty Mitchell Outstanding Actor Award for her work in Alberta Theatre Projects’ The Motherfucker with The Hat, the 2012 Langara College Outstanding Alumna Award, the 2011 Union of B.C. Performers’ Lorena Gale Woman of Distinction Award, and the 2002 New Play Centre Award for Best New Play for The Refugee Hotel, and is a 2020 Siminovitch Prize in Theatre finalist. She has over eighty films, TV, and stage acting credits. Visit www.carmenaguirre.ca to read more about Carmen’s work.
