Jose Rivera

Biography

José Rivera (born March 24, 1955) is a playwright and the first Puerto Rican screenwriter to be nominated for an Oscar. Rivera was born in the Santurce section of San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1955. He was raised in Arecibo where he lived until 1959. Rivera's family migrated from Puerto Rico when he was 4 years old, and moved to New York. They settled down in Long Island, whose small town environment would be of an influence to him in the future. His parents were very religious and he grew up in a household whose only book was the Bible. His family enjoyed telling stories and he learned a lot by hearing these stories. As a child, he also enjoyed watching The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits T.V. series. He received his primary and secondary education in the New York state public school system. In 1968, when Rivera was 12 years old, he saw a traveling company perform the play "Rumpelstiltskin" at his school. Witnessing the collective reaction of the audience towards the play convinced the young Rivera that someday, he too, would like to write plays. Career Many of his plays have been produced across the nation and even translated into several languages, including: The House of Ramon Iglesias, Cloud Tectonics, The Street of the Sun, Sonnets for an Old Century, Sueño, Giants Have Us in Their Books, References to Salvador Dalí Make Me Hot and Adoration of the Old Woman. In 2003, Cloud Tectonics was presented in the XLII Festival of Puerto Rican Theater, an event sponsored by the Puerto Rican Institute of Culture, in San Juan. Rivera helped found the Los Angeles-based theater company, The Wilton Project. The Motorcycle Diaries In 2002, Rivera was hired to write the screenplay for the film Diarios de Motocicleta (The Motorcycle Diaries) by director Walter Salles. The movie, which was released in 2004, is based on Che Guevara's diary about a motorcycle trip which he and Alberto Granado had, and how it changed their lives. In January 2005, Rivera became the first Puerto Rican to be nominated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for "Best Adapted Screenplay" for the film. His screenplay won awards from the Cinema Writers Circle (Spain) and from the Argentine Film Critics Association; it was also nominated for awards by the American Screenwriters Association, the Chlotrudis Awards, the Online Film Critics Society, and the Writers Guild of America. This work with the subject of Che Guevara later led Rivera to write and perform a play entitled School of the Americas which focuses on Che's last few hours alive. The play starring John Ortiz as Che, imagines Che's final conversations, mainly with a young and fairly naive female schoolteacher, in the one-room village schoolhouse where he is imprisoned before his execution. The play was featured in New York City 2006-2007 and later San Francisco 2008 Awards and honors Rivera has won two Obie Awards for playwriting, a Kennedy Center Fund for New American plays Grant, a Fulbright Arts Fellowship in playwriting, the Whiting Writers' Award, a McKnight Fellowship, the 2005 Norman Lear Writing Award, a 2005 Impact Award and a Berilla Kerr Playwriting Award. Trivia His play, "Boleros for the Disenchanted", at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, Illinois was nominated for a 2009 Joseph Jefferson Award for Production of a Play-Large.