About
Carmen Aguirre is a Chilean-Canadian author, actor, and playwright, and a Core Artist at Vancouver’s Electric Company Theatre . She wrote her first play, In a Land Called I Don't Remember, while still a student at Studio 58, where it premiered in 1995 to critical acclaim. It was published by Talonbooks in 2019 in an anthology of her first three plays, entitled Chile Con Carne and Other Early Works. Since then, much of her writing has been autobiographical and unabashedly left wing, exploring themes of exile, loss, alienation, and isolation. Often the tone of her work is darkly comic.
Carmen has written and co-written over twenty-five plays, including Chile Con Carne, The Refugee Hotel, The Trigger, Blue Box, Broken Tailbone, Anywhere But Here, and adaptations for the stage of Eduardo Galeano's, Jorge Amado's, and Julio Cortazar's work. She founded The Latino Theatre Group in 1994, made up of Latinx non-actors from the local Vancouver community, and co-created over twenty-five Forum Theatre pieces with them over the next eight years, including two full-length plays, ?QUE PASA with LA RAZA, eh? and Spics n' Span. She continues to facilitate Theatre of the Oppressed workshops for refugee groups, Indigenous communities, and youth groups. Her plays have been nominated for twelve local and national awards, and The Refugee Hotel won the 2002 Jessie Richardson New Play Centre Award. Her new play Fire Never Dies: The Tina Modotti Project, about the renowned 1920s photographer and revolutionary, will premiere in Vancouver in the fall of 2025, produced by Electric Company Theatre. The Consent Club (an adaption of Moliere's The Learned Ladies), a satire about zealotry, hypocritical puritanism, and sexual paranoia that takes place at the height of the Me Too movement on a North American university campus, will receive a public reading in January, 2025 at Ruby Slippers' Advance Theatre Festival. Her Medea (adapted from Euripides' original, set in Vancouver's Little Saigon in 1980) will premiere in Vancouver in the next few years.
Carmen has over eighty film, television, and stage acting credits. Theatre highlights include: Veronica in Alberta Theatre Projects' production of Stephen Adly Guirgis' The Motherfucker with the Hat, for which she won Calgary's 2014 Betty Mitchell Award for Outstanding Performance in a Supporting Role, Dona Flor in The Electric Company/Vancouver Playhouse's co-production of Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (adapted for the stage by herself and The Electric Company), and Celestina in Pi Theatre's production of Jose Rivera's Cloud Tectonics. Film and television standouts include: Daniela in the independent feature film Intersection, Constanza in the independent feature film Bella Ciao!, (2019 Leo Award nomination for Outstanding Actress in a Lead Role) Aunt Silvia in the multiple-award winning independent feature film Quinceanera, Zina Bayat in the TV series Family Law, and Alcina Albeniz in the TV series Endgame.
Carmen's first book, Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter, was published in 2011 in North America, the United Kingdom, Holland, and Finland, and in Italy in 2020. Something Fierce received rave reviews on the international stage, won CBC Canada Reads in 2012, was nominated for national and international awards, and is a #1 international bestseller. Her second memoir, Mexican Hooker #1 and My Other Roles Since the Revolution, was published in April 2016 in North America and the United Kingdom to rave reviews on the international stage, and in Italy in 2022 where it became a bestseller. In Canada, it became a Globe and Mail bestseller a week after publication and was named a best book of 2016 by The National Post and CBC. She is currently writing her first novel, Three Virgins.
Carmen, a graduate of Studio 58, is the recipient of the 2014 10 Most Influential Hispanics in Canada Award, the 2014 Latincouver Inspirational Latin Award for Achievement in Arts and Culture, the 2012 Outstanding Alumna Award from Langara College, the 2011 Union of B.C. Performers Lorena Gale Woman of Distinction Award, and the 1993 Anthony Golland Award, presented by ACTRA. She is a 2020 Siminovitch Prize finalist, the most prestigious award in Canadian theatre.