Esperanza Rosales Balcárcel (she/her) is a Guatemalan playwright and educator, born in Guatemala City and based in Brooklyn.

Her works are spiritual, hyper-theatrical narratives that give queer and trans voices a space to perform poetic journeys towards healing and transformation.

She is the recipient of the Princeton Ward Prize for Fiction, the Kennedy Center’s Latinx Playwriting Award, the National Theater Conference’s Paul Greene Award, and is a member of the third generation of the Kilroys. She holds a BA in English from Princeton University and an MFA in Playwriting from the Yale School of Drama.

Her plays have been developed and presented at New York Theater Workshop, Syracuse Stage, Roundabout Theater, Breaking the Binary Theater Festival, Crowded Fire Theater Company, the Public Theater, Playwright’s Horizon’s, INTAR, Mercury Store, The Tank, Checkmark Productions, and TheaterWorks Silicon Valley. She is a three-time finalist for the O’Neill Playwrights’ Conference and has received finalist distinctions and honorable mentions from the Relentless Award, the Leah Ryan Prize, the Bay Area Playwright’s Festival, the Ground Floor at Berkeley Rep, the Paula Vogel Playwriting Award, the Van Lier New Voices Fellowship, Portland Stage’s Clauder Prize, and was a contributing writer for the second volume of the Methuen Drama Anthology of Trans Plays. She is under commission by the Geffen Playhouse and was a recent fellow for the Sundance Theater Lab.

Along with writing, Esperanza has a passion for producing new works by Queer BIPOC artists. She was one of the 2022 Producing Artistic Directors of the Yale Summer Cabaret, where their collective raised over $30,000 to commission and produce an entire season of new plays by Queer BIPOC writers from the New Haven community, including Maia Novi’s Invasive Species (Vineyard Theater), a.k. payne’s BurnBabyBurn: An American Dream (Atlantic Theater Company), m. imani west’s fuckin’ loud (Hollywood Fringe Festival), Rudi Goblen’s Ser Humano and yao’s ARLO. She is formerly the Director of Programs & Learning at the Baldwin Institute, where she helped create educational and artistic third spaces for students in the city of New York, including a Summer Young Civic Arts Institute.

She currently teaches playwriting at the Public Theater and has lectured at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, where she was on the full-time playwriting faculty for several years. She is a former Teach for America Fellow and has taught English Language Arts in high-need communities, including Los Angeles, Brooklyn, New Haven, Tulsa, and more. A proud first-generation, low-income graduate, she is the descendant of Indigenous Maya domestic workers in Guatemala and America. Her writing is in honor of her family, her people, her land, and the young queer artists who will one day find her plays and know they were never alone.