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Héctor Alvarez is a director, teaching artist, translator and theater critic currently based in Los Angeles. He has a decade of experience working with youth in public schools settings as well as with incarcerated youth and adults. He was the executive director of Still Point Theater Collective (a Chicago-based organization that provides arts outreach programs to adults with developmental disabilities, currently and formerly incarcerated women, and senior citizens) from 2017-2019.
He is also a Watson Fellowship recipient, which allowed him to conduct research in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil and the UK for a year. His project, “Social Acupuncture: The Role of the Theater Director in Community-based Performance” studied the skills and tools deployed by theater directors and companies to empower and heal communities at risk or communities that had suffered some form of trauma. Héctor holds a masters degree in Anglo-American modernist literature from University College London, and a bachelor’s degree in theater and international studies from Macalester College (USA). He is currently working on an MFA in Directing at California Institute of the Arts.
In 2017 he received an HIA Senior Fellow grant to develop his one-man show about gun violence The Ghoul Exhibition (directed by Melissa Lorraine), described by The Chicago Reader as “A deeply affecting solo show. Truly audacious.” Recent directing credits include We’re Gonna Die, a film re-imagining of Young Jean Lee’s existential cabaret about life’s awfulness and its sweet comforts. The film was created in isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic and was named one of 2020’s Top Cultural Picks by WDCB’s The Arts Section; La Pura Idea Excita (Teatro Lucido, Mexico City); Self-Accusation (Theatre Y, Chicago), and Malaga, Or The Inner Ear (Theatre Y, Chicago).
Updated October 2021