Kristoffer Díaz is an American playwright, screenwriter, and educator. As a playwright, he has five full-length titles amongst other works which have been widely produced and developed. In 2010, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In 2011, The New York Times awarded Díaz with the Outstanding Playwright Award. He has worked with television networks like HBO, FX, Fox, ESPN, and Netflix. Díaz currently teaches at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Díaz is the Head of Admissions and an associate professor at New York University Tisch School of the Arts. Diaz teaches dramatic writing and contemporary US theater. Diaz's primary focus is American plays and musicals.
Diaz has lived and worked in the New York City area, which has served as the setting for a number of his works. Diaz has credited a 1992 experience seeing John Leguizamo's Spic-o-Rama at the Westside Theater in New York City as an early influence on his work as a Latino playwright.
Theater
Notable involvement
Díaz is a resident playwright for Teatro Vista, a nonprofit theater company in Chicago, Illinois. For Teatro Vista's 2008–2009 season, Díaz co-produced with Victory Gardens Theater for the world premiere of his play The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity. His next world premiere with Teatro Vista was The Upstairs Concierge, a farcical comedy produced by Goodman Theatre in the 2014–2015 season. Later in 2015, Díaz was the first recipient of the New Playwright Residency Program Award from Temple University and commissioned to write a play for the Department of Theater. Díaz also collaborated directly with staff and the student body, "conducting master classes for students in the MFA playwriting program and observing the work of the MFA acting students". In 2017, Díaz received a Tisch School of the Arts Dean's Faculty Grant to conduct research at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics conference. He is recognized as an alumni playwright for New Dramatists from 2011 to 2018. In addition, Díaz co-founded the Unit Collective and is a recipient of the Jerome Fellowship, the Future Aesthetics Artist Regrant, inaugural Gail Merrifield Papp Fellowship, and the Van Lier Fellowship.
Diaz has worked at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts for almost ten years and has worked with many theaters throughout his time as a professor and director.
The theaters and theater companies with which Diaz has worked and produced various plays include The Public Theater, Dallas Theater Center, Geffen Playhouse, Center Theatre Group, The Goodman, Second Stage, Victory Gardens, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Actors Theatre of Louisville, American Theater Company, The Atlantic, InterAct, Mixed Blood, The Orchard Project, Hip-Hop Theater Festival, The Lark, Summer Play Festival, Donmar Warehouse, and South Coast Repertory.
Involvement with theater during COVID-19
During the time of COVID-19 lockdowns, Diaz was involved with initiatives in theatre to stage virtual performances. In collaboration with State Theatre New Jersey, Diaz made the script for his 2020 play The Bridge available for home audiences to cast and produce as part of the Play at Home project. The Bridge was one of the plays that he showed virtually during COVID, and the State Theatre had instructions and rules on how to find these plays and offered certain plays on a household Marquee to see these plays.
Also during COVID-19 shutdowns, in August 2020, Diaz collaborated on and directed a virtual reading of The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity with the members from the original cast, including Justin Kirk. The virtual reading was presented on Zoom.
Notable works
Díaz has written short work for The 24 Hour Plays and The 24 Hour Musicals on Broadway. He co-wrote Brink!, a full-length play featured in the Humana Festival of New American Plays in 2009. Other plays include Things With Friends, Swag (or Fucking Vigwan), #therevolution, Guernica, Rebecca Oaxaca Lays Down a Bunt, and Going Left.
Díaz's most highly awarded play is The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, as it qualified him as a Pulitzer Prize finalist. The play is Diaz's most well-known, and like many of his works is set in New York City, and deals with aspects of popular culture, in this case focusing on wrestling.