MICHAEL GARCÉS
Cornerstone Theater Company
Michael John Garcés is the artistic director of Cornerstone Theater Company. He is a recipient of the Doris Duke Artist Award, the Princess Grace Statue, the Alan Schneider Director Award, TCG/New Generations Grant, and the Non-Profit Excellence Award from the Center of Non-Profit Management. He serves as Executive Vice President of the board of the Stage Directors and Choreography Society.
Plays he has written include 36 Yesses and Magic Fruit (Cornerstone); TOWN (Theatre Horizon); and south (Great Plains Theatre Commons). Directing credits include The Rivers Don't Know by James McManus (City Theatre Company); Highland Park is Here by Mark Valdez (Cornerstone and Latino Theatre Company's "Re:Encuentro 2021"); The Play You Want by Bernardo Cubria (The Road Theatre); Seize the King by Will Power (The Alliance); Larissa FastHorse's The Thanksgiving Play (The Geffen Playhouse) and Urban Rez (Cornerstone); and the just and the blind by Marc Bamuthi Joseph and composer Daniel Bernard Roumain (Carnegie Hall and The Kennedy Center).
Cornerstone Theater Company collaborates with communities. Our work reflects complexity, disrupts assumptions, welcomes difference, and amplifies joy. We aim to advance a more compassionate, equitable, and just world. By combining the artistry of people with many levels of theatrical experience, we act upon the conviction that artistic expression is civic engagement and that access to a creative forum is essential to the wellness and health of every individual and community.
Cornerstone is a non-profit leader in community engaged theater. The plays are staged in traditional and non-traditional performance spaces, but always in a location significant and accessible to the collaborating communities: factories, schools, community centers, service organizations, or adjacent to sacred land. Cornerstone strives to include people, in the audience and in the plays, who have never been on stage or may have never seen theater; the plays celebrate many voices.
