I work in theater, performance, film, and recently created a podcast. I have centered my work on issues of identity. I use humor and fantasy as tools to challenge cultural stereotypes and rewrite history from multiple perspectives. I perform hyperbolic feminine and masculine personas as well as numerous animals, insects and fantasy creatures to challenge historical and narrative authority.

Alina Troyano, aka Carmelita Tropicana (she/her), is a Cuban born New York based writer and performer. Tropicana uses irreverent humor and fantasy as subversive tools to challenge cultural stereotypes and rewrite history from multiple perspectives. She performs hyperbolic feminine and masculine personas, as well as numerous animals, insects, and fantasy creatures, to challenge historical and narrative authority. Her work addresses political issues and looks at the intersections that exist between ethnicity, sexuality, gender, race and class. Select awards include a United States Artists Fellowship (2021), John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2017), Creative Capital Award (2016), MacDowell Fellowship (2016), Anonymous Was a Woman (2005), New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships (1987, 1991, 2006) and an Obie Award (1999). Her writing appears in I, Carmelita Tropicana, Performing Between Cultures (2000), a collection of scripts, short stories, essay and she was one of the editors on Memories of the Revolution: The First Ten Years of the Wow Café Theater (2015); her solo Milk of Amnesia will appear in the forthcoming A Handbook of LatinX Art. She serves on the New York Foundation for the Arts Board of Directors and is a member of the Dramatist Guild.

Selected Works