Alexander Santiago-Jirau Email & Phone Number

Alexander Santiago-Jirau (he/él) is Executive Director at Opening Act (OA), an organization committed to closing the arts education access gap in New York City by centering students’ voices through free, high-quality theatre programming and alumni career development programs. Before joining OA, Alex was Director of Education and Community Engagement at New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW), where he oversaw intergenerational programming, student matinees, in-school classroom residencies, after-school programs, masterclasses, fellowships, and community-based programs. Highlights of his work at NYTW include developing educational materials and engagement programming for the world premiere of Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown, developed with and directed by Rachel Chavkin, Othello, directed by Sam Gold featuring Daniel Craig and David Oyelowo, Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me, Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play, and the revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along. During his tenure at NYTW, he started the 2050 Administrative Fellowship, a yearlong fellowship program for emerging leaders underrepresented in the field of theatre administration, facilitated intergenerational workshops internationally and across the country, and created the Youth Artistic Instigators ensemble.A Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) practitioner who studied and worked with Augusto Boal, Alex has not only facilitated numerous workshops and community-based projects throughout his career, particularly with youth, educators, and immigrant communities, but also held significant leadership roles in the field. He is a past president of the Board of Directors of Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed, Inc., a national organization devoted to the work of liberatory educators, activists, artists, and community organizers.Alex has presented his work at numerous conferences, and his writing has appeared in American Theatre, The Indypendent, TYA Today, The Cross Border Project Blog, “Come Closer”: Critical Perspectives on Theatre of the Oppressed, The Routledge Companion to Theatre of the Oppressed, and Applied Theatre with Youth: Education, Engagement, Activism. He has taught Latin American and Latinx Theatre at Drew University. Currently, he teaches TO for the Department of Drama at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and the Educational Theatre Program at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.He holds a BS in Urban and Regional Studies from Cornell University and an MA in Educational Theatre from NYU Steinhardt.

Listed skills include Theatre, Teaching, Arts Administration, Grant Writing, and 35 others.