Roberto G. Varea began his career in theater in his native Argentina. His creative work and writing focuses on live performance as means of resistance and peacebuilding in the context of social conflict and state violence. Roberto regularly presents on his research and conducts workshops in academic and community forums around the world. His stage work in the United States includes directing premieres of plays by Latin@/Chican@ authors such as Migdalia Cruz, Ariel Dorfman, Cherrié Moraga, and José Rivera. His socially-engaged practice includes the founding and artistic direction of Soapstone Theatre Company, a collective of male ex-offenders and women survivors of violent crime, El Teatro Jornalero!, a performance company of Latin American immigrant workers, and the performance artist’s collective Secos & Mojados, which engages with issues of migration, transnationalism, and displacement. Varea is a member of the Steering Committee of Theater Without Borders, and a member of the Distress Services Committee of freeDimensional, an organization that provides aid to artists in grave danger in conflict zones. He is a regular contributor and guest editor to journals in performance, politics, and peacebuilding such as emisférica (NYU – NYC,)Contemporary Theatre Review (Routledge – UK,) and Peace Review (Routledge – US,) and is co-editor and co-author of the two-volume anthology Acting Together: Performance and the Creative Transformation of Conflict (New Village Press, Oakland – NYC). Varea is a founding faculty of the Department of Performing Arts, as well as the Performing Arts and Social Justice Program, and the Critical Diversity Studies Major at the University of San Francisco, where he also serves as co-director of the Center for Latino Studies in the Americas (CELASA).
