Adriana Santos

Adriana Santos is a Colombian-American playwright, screenwriter, actor and filmmaker. She is a trilingual daughter of immigrants from Miami and part of a wave of immigrants’ children who look just like their parents but don’t have their accents. Her work aims to specify an experience of not quite fitting into Latina stereotypes or traditionally white American ways of life yet feeling both wholly Latina and American at the same time.

She has a BFA in Drama and minor in Creative Writing from NYU Tisch School of the Arts and an MFA in Playwriting from The Writer's Foundry at St. Joseph’s University in Brooklyn.

She wrote, directed and acted in an original one act play, Aguantando, at Tisch’s Experimental Theatre Wing in 2016 and since then her plays, including full lengths ELENA, Catholic...

Adriana Santos is a Colombian-American playwright, screenwriter, actor and filmmaker. She is a trilingual daughter of immigrants from Miami and part of a wave of immigrants’ children who look just like their parents but don’t have their accents. Her work aims to specify an experience of not quite fitting into Latina stereotypes or traditionally white American ways of life yet feeling both wholly Latina and American at the same time.

She has a BFA in Drama and minor in Creative Writing from NYU Tisch School of the Arts and an MFA in Playwriting from The Writer's Foundry at St. Joseph’s University in Brooklyn.

She wrote, directed and acted in an original one act play, Aguantando, at Tisch’s Experimental Theatre Wing in 2016 and since then her plays, including full lengths ELENA, Catholic All Girls School and Cris Leaves Queens, have been read, workshopped and produced as staged readings in New York, LA and regionally. Catholic All Girls School was workshopped as part of IAMA Theatre Company’s Under30Lab in 2020. A TV pilot adaptation of that play was an official selection of The Gotham’s Project Market in 2021. In 2022 Adriana co-wrote IAMA’s mainstage play, Celestial Events, in which she also acted and which ran to rave reviews. Cris Leaves Queens was read at IAMA’s 2022 New Works Festival and received a workshop and staged reading in Boulder, CO with Local Theater Company as part of their Local Lab 12.

Screenwriting credits include co-writing the narrative short Shutterbird, directed by Justin R. Ching, and writing The End of the Party, a short directed by Kate Sullivan. Most recently, Adriana completed her film directorial debut with her original short, Hey You Guys, in which she also acted.

As an actor, Adriana has worked extensively across film, TV and theatre. Recent credits include: series regular on the Showtime pilot, Hombre, recurring roles on Animal Kingdom (TNT) and 9-1-1 (FOX), guest stars on The Rookie (ABC), Daredevil (Netflix), and Taken (NBC) and the world premiere of the immersive theatre play G7:2070 by William Hector and directed by Victoria Collado which took place at The Kampong Botanical Garden in Miami, FL.

Adriana is a current company member of IAMA Theatre Company as a playwright and actor, an alumna of IAMA’s Emerging Playwrights Lab and Ensemble Studio Theatre LA’s New West Playwrights group and was a founding member of the Latinx Playwrights Circle in New York City.

Scripts

Cris Leaves Queens

by Adriana Santos

Synopsis

A family-run funeral home in Queens comes under threat from an incoming snow storm, forcing twin sisters, their father and a guest to come face to face with what’s been haunting them, along with several other quirky undead.

A family-run funeral home in Queens comes under threat from an incoming snow storm, forcing twin sisters, their father and a guest to come face to face with what’s been haunting them, along with several other quirky undead.

Catholic All Girls School

by Adriana Santos

Synopsis

An overachieving high schooler at Miami’s most prestigious Catholic all girls school has the perfect plan to get into her dream college, until an attractive, young, ex-priest is hired as her new ethics teacher and begins to dismantle all she knows about right and wrong and falling in love.

An overachieving high schooler at Miami’s most prestigious Catholic all girls school has the perfect plan to get into her dream college, until an attractive, young, ex-priest is hired as her new ethics teacher and begins to dismantle all she knows about right and wrong and falling in love.

ELENA

by Adriana Santos

Synopsis

ELENA is a harsh unveiling of the dynamics between the upper and lower classes of Latin Americans in Miami. For the wealthiest in the city, housekeepers are an essential feature of their way of living. But what do employees owe their employers, really? Elena, a struggling Venezuelan immigrant, is grateful to find work in the Rodriguez household. But with three adult siblings dealing with their own messy lives...

ELENA is a harsh unveiling of the dynamics between the upper and lower classes of Latin Americans in Miami. For the wealthiest in the city, housekeepers are an essential feature of their way of living. But what do employees owe their employers, really? Elena, a struggling Venezuelan immigrant, is grateful to find work in the Rodriguez household. But with three adult siblings dealing with their own messy lives, and a matriarch grieving the death of her husband, her distress is muffled under their drama...until a boundary is crossed and the family is forced to deal with the help differently.

Aguantando

by Adriana Santos

Synopsis

Surreal scenes around the kitchen table. A family is forced to re-live the same dinner three times as they grieve the complicated loss of a member not yet dead but acutely un-present.

Surreal scenes around the kitchen table. A family is forced to re-live the same dinner three times as they grieve the complicated loss of a member not yet dead but acutely un-present.