Award Ceremony. Aguijón Theater International Playwriting Contest 2022. Staged reading: The Happy Pill by Carla Guimarães
Aguijón Theater Company, the National Museum of Mexican Art, and the Instituto Cervantes of Chicago will officially present the Aguijón Theater International Playwriting Award 2022 to La pastilla de la felicidad by Carla Guimarães (Brazil/Spain) and the Honorable Mention to Win Win by Diego Pereira (Argentina). Immediately following the ceremony, Aguijón Theater will present a staged reading of the winning play, La pastilla de la felicidad by Carla Guimarães. The Aguijón Theater International Playwriting Contest (formerly International Hispanic Playwriting Contest of Chicago) was founded in 2014 by Aguijón Theater Company with the support and collaboration of the Instituto Cervantes of Chicago. This fifth edition counts with the additional support of Chicago’s National Museum of Mexican Art. The main purpose of this biennial contest is to promote contemporary stage works by authors who write and dream in Spanish, regardless of their country of residence. On this occasion, 119 plays were submitted by writers from 19 countries: Germany, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, USA, Spain, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Poland, Dominican Republic, Uruguay and Venezuela. The jury was made up of Matías Armas Lago (Uruguay); José Luis García Barrientos (Spain); Luisa Angélica Sherezada Vicioso (Dominican Republic); Mercedes Melo Pereira (Cuba) and Andrea Ojeda (Mexico). Carla Guimarães was born in Salvador de Bahía, Brazil, and lives in Madrid, Spain. She has a degree in Social Communication and a PhD in Theory, History and Practice of Theater. Contributor to the newspaper El País, scriptwriter for channels such as HBO and La 2 of Televisión Española and for the Brazilian feature films Estranhos and Perto do Céu. Journalist for Agencia Efe and playwright of plays such as Chuvisco, el bandolero arisco (Award for the best project for the dissemination of Brazilian culture in Spain), Hendaya: cuando Adolfo encontró a Paco (Teatro Nuevo Alcalá season 2012), El gato y la Golondrina (Teatro Circo de Murcia season 2013) and La increíble historia de la chica que llegó la última (developed in the Laboratorio “En Blanco” at Cuarta Pared). Translator of novels into Spanish. She was programming director of the Muestra de Cine Brasileño en España – Novocine. Ediciones Ambulantes published her following works: Los últimos días de Carnaval (novel, 2013); Peces que llueven del cielo (novel, 2016), and she penned the chapter Un domingo cualquiera in the choral work Brasil. Golpe de 2016 (essay, 2016)
