Oscar Giner

Oscar Giner is a dramatic poet who has been working in the American Southwest and in his native Caribbean for more than four decades. He is a graduate of Yale College and earned a Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the Yale School of Drama in 1987. He is a professor at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University, where he has had a long standing association with the Barrett Honors College.

Giner is an actor, theater director, playwright and translator. He was founding artistic director of the Corral de la Cruz in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where his productions received numerous awards from the local press and the Institute of Puerto Rican culture. His original play Nosferatu and his Spanish translations of Shakespeare´s Magical Trilogy (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth and The Tempest) have been produced by Producciones Aleph in Puerto Rico. He was artistic director of La Compañía de Teatro de Alburquerque in New Mexico, and was guest artist at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, where he produced an English version of the only extant tragedy of the Maya Theater, the Rabinal Achí (published in Tyuony, Institute of American Indian Arts, 1986). He has also worked as a language consultant (with Professor Rebecca Blum Martinez, University of New Mexico) for the Navajo Nation and other Spanish and Native American bilingual programs in the Southwest.

Giner’s research focuses on myths and rituals of the Medieval Religious stage and Native American performance practices. His articles and book reviews have appeared in Theater, the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, and (with Robert L. Ivie) the Presidential Studies Quarterly and Rhetoric and Public Affairs.