JOSÉ LUIS VALENZUELA
Latino Theater Company
José Luis Valenzuela (he/him) is the Artistic Director of the Latino Theater Company (LTC), and The Los Angeles Theatre Center (LATC) and is also a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film & Television. Valenzuela is an award-winning theater director and has been a visionary and an advocate for Chicanx/Latinx Theater for over 30 years.
He has directed critically-acclaimed productions at major international and national theaters including the LATC where he created the Latino Theatre Lab in 1985 and the Mark Taper Forum, where he established the Latino Theater Initiative in 1991. He has directed Sleep With The Angels, The Mother of Henry, Solitude, Premeditation, Dementia, and A Mexican Trilogy for the Latino Theatre Company. He also recently directed Macbeth at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Karen Zacarias’ Destiny of Desire at Arena Stage, South Coast Rep, The Goodman Theatre, and Oregon Shakespeare Festival. His international directing credits include Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt at the Norland Theatre in Norway and Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman at the National Theatre of Norway. He produced the national Encuentro Festival in 2014, the national and international Encuentro de las Americas in 2017, and the virtual RE: Encuentro in 2021.
Jose Luis is a Director, along with Olga Garay-English, of the National Latinx Theater Initiative (NLTI) created to provide multi-year general operating support grants to Latinx theaters in the U.S. and Puerto Rico and to offer professional development opportunities to Latinx theaters such as convening, co-production and touring support, and introductions to local and national funders.
The Latino Theater Company's (LTC) mission at The Los Angeles Theatre Center (the LATC), is to provide a world-class arts center for those pursuing artistic excellence; a laboratory where both tradition and innovation are honored and honed; a place where the convergence of people, cultures, and ideas contribute to the future.
We believe the theater creates empathy and educates, has the power to provoke dialogue by illuminating the social issues of our times, and can awaken the collective consciousness of a community to act in creating a better tomorrow.
LTC was founded in 1985 with the goal to establish a theater company dedicated to contributing new stories and novel methods of expression for the American theater repertoire and to increase artistic opportunities for underserved communities. As the company has evolved, our role as the lease-holder of the LATC has become critical to our mission. As we continue to explore the U.S. Latina/o/x experience in bold and contemporary terms, we program our Fall and Spring Seasons with work by local playwrights that speaks to important issues and highlights new voices within the Latina/o/x, First Nation, Black, Asian American, Jewish American and LGBTQ+ communities.
