Monique Mojica

Monique Mojica (Guna and Rappahannock nations) Actor/ playwright Monique Mojica is passionately dedicated to a theatrical practice as an act of healing, of reclaiming historical/ cultural memory and of resistance. Spun directly from the family-web of New York’s Spiderwoman Theater, her theatrical practice embraces not only her artistic lineage through mining stories embeded in the body, but also the connection to stories coming through land and place.

Monique’s first play Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots was produced in 1990 and is widely taught in curricula internationally. She was a co-founder of Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble with whom she created The Scrubbing Project, the Dora-nominated The Triple Truth and The Only Good Indian. In 2007, she founded Chocolate Woman Collective to develop the play Chocolate Woman Dreams the Milky Way, a performance created by devising a dramaturgy specific to Guna cultural aesthetics, story narrative and literary structure.

Monique has taught Indigenous Theatre in theory, process and practice at the University of Illinois, the Institute of American Indian Arts, McMaster University and is a former co- director of the Centre for Indigenous Theatre. She has lectured on embodied research and taught embodied performance workshops throughout Canada, the U.S., Latin America and Europe.

She was most recently seen onstage in Kaha:wii Dance Theatre’s world premiere of Re-Quickening choreographed by Santee Smith and with the National Arts Centre Orchestra in I Lost My Talk as part of the Life Reflected series.

Upcoming projects include Side Show Freaks & Circus Injuns co-written with Choctaw playwright, LeAnne Howe and directed by Jorge Luis Morejón with an illustrious collaborative team of Indigenous artists from diverse disciplines.