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

Her works are spiritual, hyper-theatrical narratives that give Black and Brown Queer+ Trans voices a space to interrogate core wounds and offer them a path towards healing.

Esperanza is the recipient of the Princeton Ward Prize for Fiction and Outstanding Achievement in Theater Prize, the Eugene O'Neill Memorial Scholarship from the Yale School of Drama, the Paul Greene Award from the National Theatre Conference, and is a proud member of the third generation of the Kilroys collective.

Her play, Color Boy, received the Kennedy Center's Latinx Playwriting Award and Paula Vogel Playwriting Award (finalist), an Honorable Mention for the 2024 Relentless Award, a nomination for the 2025 Venturous Playwright Fellowship from the Playwright’s Center, and was named the Connecticut State Winner for New England’s Clauder Prize from Portland Stage. Her play, Lupe Finds Me in the Garden of Dreams, was a finalist for the Leah Ryan Prize, the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, the Van Lier Fellowship for New Voices at Rattlestick Theater, and the Ground Floor Development Lab at Berkeley Rep. Lupe Finds Me was developed through New York Theater Workshop’s 2024 Summer Dartmouth Residency, was presented at the 2024 Breaking the Binary Theatre Festival at Playwrights Horizons, and is a current finalist for the 47th Bay Area Playwright’s Festival. She is a two-time nominee for the Ollie Award and finalist for the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, a nominee for the L. Arnold Weissberger New Play Award and the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and is a contributor to the second volume of Methuen Drama’s Anthology of Trans Plays. Most recently, she had the honor of being the Featured Playwright-In-Residence for the 2025 Julie Lutz Cold Reads Festival of New American Plays at Syracuse Stage, and her new play, Lux & Rex Are The Brightest Things In This Forsaken World, was presented at Checkmark Production’s Summer Reading Series at INTAR in August. This spring, she will be one of nine inaugural writing fellows for the Dunaway Gardens Playwrights Lab, a continuation of the previous 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 currently a teaching artist for the Public Theater, an IB Theater Advisor at Brooklyn Prospect Charter High School, the Arts-Based Learning Manager and Curriculum Developer at the Baldwin Institute, and is on the full time Playwriting Faculty at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale.

She received her BA in English Literature from Princeton University, and her MFA in Playwriting from the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale. She is a proud first-generation, low-income student. Everything is in honor of her family, her people, her country, and the queer kids who follow.