José Teodoro is a writer and director working across forms such as theatre, literature, cinema, and music.
His plays include The Tourist, which was dubbed “a masterpiece” by The Edmonton Journal, and Steps, which was published in the Playwrights Canada Press anthology Long Story Short, as well as Mote, Slowly, an exchange is taking place, and Cloudless, which was adapted into a serial audio drama starring Carmen Aguirre and presented by Canadian Stage in 2021. His latest play, Binary Star, is being developed as part of Playwrights Theatre Centre’s Associates program, the Banff Playwrights Lab, and Caravan Farm Theatre’s National Playwrights Retreat. His other latest play, Island, was developed with the support of Playwrights Theatre Centre’s WrightSpace program, the Banff Playwrights Lab, and Tarragon Theatre, and is the winner of the 2024 Lee Playwriting Prize for New Canadian Plays.
Along with composer-musician Stephen Lyons, José is the co-founder of Applied Silence, a group focused on artworks that fuse music and narrative. Their first major project is a recording of Screen Door, an adaptation of José’s work for actors and musicians, available online and on vinyl via Offseason Records. Watch the trailer here. You can listen or makes purchases via our Bandcamp page. Applied Silence debuted Screen Door live in December 2021 as part of Pi Theatre’s Provocateur series. Applied Silence also created the soundscape for Snezana Pesic’s film Suture, which won Best Experimental Film at the 2022 Toronto Independent Film Festival, among other awards. Applied Silence recently traveled to the Cali International Film Festival (FICCALI) with the short film Binary Star, which José wrote and directed, which is related to his eponymous play, and which was screened with live music and voiceover. The film has since won Best Experimental Film at the 2024 Vancouver International ShortsFest.
José’s works of literary nonfiction includes The Rusted Floor, which appears in Brick 106, Curtains, which was published in subTerrain 90, and Cul-de-sac, which appeared in The Fiddlehead 292. José is co-author, with Mexican artist Laura Barrón, of Cathedral, a bilingual 3.5-metre-long book of text and image, and, with Mexican author Andrés Acosta, of Mérida, a prose exchange published in both dANDelion and as a stand-alone volume from La Mano izquierda Press.
José is also a culture writer, contributing essays, interviews and reviews to publications such as Brick, The Globe & Mail, Film Comment, Bloodvine, Quill & Quire, Cinema Scope, Stop Smiling, Long Takes, SubTerrain and The Literary Review of Canada. He has served on juries at over a dozen film festivals throughout Europe and the Americas. He was a juror for the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize for Canadian literature. José has designed and administered interdisciplinary thematic workshops, such as Dream Reportage and Object Study for Historic Joy Kogawa House, and Art & Ephemerality, with French vocalist Alexandra Templier, and The Vocal Spectrum for Toronto’s Institute for Creative Exchange, and Memory Lines: New Approaches to Life Writing, for Burnaby Public Library. José has also served as story editor on several acclaimed films, including Lina Rodriguez’s This Time Tomorrow and Hugh Gibson’s TFCA Roger’s Best Canadian Film Award-winner The Stairs, and served as co-scenarist and moustache expert in Richard Keating’s A Change of Face.
José is an alumnus of the Canadian Film Centre’s Writer’s Lab, Historic Joy Kogawa House’s writer-in-residence program, Deer Lake Artist Residency, and Seattle’s Annex Theatre’s Hothouse. He is a two-time alumnus of Vancouver’s Playwrights Theatre Centre’s WrightSpace, is a current PTC Associate, and has been an invited participant in several thematic residencies at the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity, such as the Playwrights Lab, Play-finding with Daniel MacIvor, and the Canada-Mexico Writing-Photography Exchange.
Aside from the plays Binary Star, José’s current projects include a nonfiction novel, which has been supported by the Banff Centre’s Form and Constraint residency; a book of conversations with filmmaker Peter Mettler entitled Nothing But Time; a screen adaptation of Cloudless with producer Hugh Gibson; and Island, which was developed as part of PTC’s WrightSpace and the 2020 Banff Playwrights Lab. As well, with Applied Silence, and under the auspices of Playwrights Workshop Montréal’s Dramaturgical Collaboration program, José and Stephen developing a cycle of narrative songs on labour and migration entitled Finisher.
José has worked as a writer and editor for the Toronto and Panama International Film Festivals, and as a writer, editor. and programmer for the Miami International Film Festival. He has made food, delivered food, delivered singing telegrams, delivered urgent documents, delivered people, translated for people, played records for people, constructed shelves, cleaned shelves, and stocked shelves. He once did a fair bit of acting and will surely act more and better. He is a member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada, the Toronto Film Critics Association and FIPRESCI. Available for all manner of public speaking engagements.