A native of the San Francisco Bay Area currently residing in Boston, Dr. Takeo Rivera is a playwright and assistant professor in English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Boston University. Rivera’s creative work focuses largely on race, gender, and sexuality, experimenting with poetry, comedy, and emotional viscera to unsettle our assumptions of both the spectacular and the mundane. His first major play, Goliath, was held for national consideration by the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival, won Outstanding New Play at the Planet Connections Theater Festivity in New York City, and toured the east coast and the San Francisco Bay Area, produced by Poetic Theater Productions. As a member of the San Francisco PlayGround writer’s pool, Rivera wrote the comedy short Feminist Valhalla, which was staged at the Berkeley Repertory Theater and won the PlayGround People’s Choice Award for March 2015. Rivera also co-founded the New Play Reading Series at UC Berkeley, a program that develops 6-8 plays-in-progress written by early- to mid-career playwrights each year. Other works that have been read or staged include R&L, Prometheus Nguyen, Die Soon, and The Will to Knowledge. As a professor, Rivera teaches courses in drama, Asian American literature, queer theory, and new media, and is currently revising his book manuscript, entitled Model Minority Masochism. Rivera was also a member of the 2018 PlayLab Unit at CompanyONE Theatre in Boston.