Team

Alexander Santiago-Jirau (he/él) is a theater artist and administrator with twenty years of experience in arts education, youth development, and community and audience engagement. 

Most recently, Alex was Director of Education and Community Engagement at New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW), where for ten years, he oversaw intergenerational programming, student matinees, in-school classroom residencies, after-school programs, masterclasses, fellowships, and community-based programs. Highlights of his work at NYTW include developing educational materials and curating engagement programming for the world premiere of Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown, developed with and directed by Rachel Chavkin, Othello, directed by Sam Gold featuring Daniel Craig and David Oyelowo, Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me, Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play, and the recent revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along starring Daniel Radcliffe, Jonathan Groff, and Lindsay Mendez. During his tenure at NYTW, he also started the 2050 Administrative Fellowship, a yearlong fellowship program for emerging leaders underrepresented in the field of theater administration, facilitated intergenerational workshops internationally and across the country, and created NYTW’s Youth Artistic Instigators ensemble for NYC high school students.

Before joining NYTW, Alex served as Associate Director of Teaching and Learning at The Center for Arts Education, where he led the Career Development Program for high school internships in the creative industries and managed its teaching artist roster.

A Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) practitioner who studied and worked with Augusto Boal, Alex has not only facilitated numerous workshops and community-based projects throughout his career, particularly with youth, educators, and immigrant communities, but also held significant leadership roles in the field. He is Past-President of the Board of Directors of Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed, Inc., a national organization devoted to the work of liberatory educators, activists, artists, and community organizers, and the current Vice Chair of the NYC Arts in Education Roundtable, a service organization for arts education advocates and practitioners.

Alex has presented his work at numerous conferences, and his writing has appeared in The Indypendent, TYA Today, The Cross Border Project Blog, “Come Closer”: Critical Perspectives on Theatre of the Oppressed, The Routledge Companion to Theatre of the Oppressed, and Applied Theatre with Youth: Education, Engagement, Activism. He has taught Latin American and Latinx Theatre at Drew University. Currently, he teaches TO for the Department of Drama at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and the Educational Theatre Program at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.

He holds a BS in Urban and Regional Studies from Cornell University and an MA in Educational Theatre from NYU Steinhardt.