bio
francisca da silveira is a Cape Verdean-American playwright, tv writer and Boston native whose work has been featured in ArtsBoston, The LA Times, The Boston Globe and American Theatre Magazine. In 2023, her play CAN I TOUCH IT? enjoyed a Rolling World Premiere at Company One Theatre (Boston), Rogue Machine Theatre (Los Angeles), and Cleveland Public Theatre (Cleveland). Her play PAY NO WORSHIP was a 2023 Finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and received its World Premiere at InterAct Theatre Company (Philadelphia) in April 2023. Her play NOT-FOR-PROFIT (OR THE EQUITY, DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION PLAY) will receive its World Premiere with Cleveland Public Theatre in Fall 2024.
da silveira was a 2020-2021 Playwrights Realm Writing Fellow, a member of The Public Theater’s 2020-2023 Emerging Writers Group, a 2022-2023 Jerome Fellow with the Playwrights’ Center, a member of The Apollo Theater’s 2023 New Works Initiative Cohort, and a 2023 NYSCA commission recipient with The New Group (NYC). she is currently the 2024-2025 Tow Playwright-in-Resisence with WP Theatre (NYC), where her play MINOR·ITY will receive its World Premiere in Spring 2025, co-produced by commissioning theatre Colt Coeur (NYC). In TV land, da silveira was in the writers’ room for HBO's Season 3 of INDUSTRY and in development with HBO. She holds a BFA in Dramatic Writing from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and an MSc in Playwriting from the University of Edinburgh.
artistic statement
As an artist, I identify as both a playwright and as a dramaturg – the two are intrinsically linked for me and one cannot exist without the other. As the latter, I have come to understand the difficulties writers face daily in trying to get their plays into the hands of any theatremaking body, let alone a theatremaking body that has the resources and skills to nurture and support new work. As an emerging playwright of color, I understand how those difficulties are exponentially compounded by institutional racism and the antiquated idea that only plays written by white men are marketable and worth taking a chance on.
My artistic mission both as a playwright and as a dramaturg has always been to explode this idea from the inside out. I believe that artists, in particular artists of color, should be unapologetic about their work and about claiming space that has for too long been off limits to them. As a live artistic medium, theatre has the incredible ability to bring together a group of people who are forced to share in an experience that is cathartic and (hopefully) inspires action. My goal is to make sure that that group is as diverse as possible and that my work can in one way or another speak to this diversity. When working on a new project, the questions I ask myself go beyond craft and form/content relationship. They are politically motivated and socially conscious. Who is this play for? Who needs to come see it? Why this story now? What excites me about it? And, more importantly, what scares me about it? It is in the nuance between excitement and fear that I want both my characters and my audiences to exist in.
If we’re going to use labels, I’d probably fall under quasi-naturalism. My plays are character driven, relationship driven, and often prioritize interpersonal conflict. It all seems real until all of a sudden, the form transforms, and you realize that something wasn’t quite right from the beginning. I write comedy but the kind where you stop laughing abruptly and question whether or not you were meant to be laughing in the first place. My characters are adults not because they learn from their mistakes but because the thought never crosses their minds to do so. I aim to create modern day cautionary tales dealing with mental health, heritage, racial identity and human resilience.
I believe that all art created by people of color is inherently political purely from the act of its existence.
lowercase
I am from Cape Verde, a group of 10 islands off the west coast of Africa, a former Portuguese colony. My last name, Da Silveira, means "of the Silveira family." Everyone in my family spells it differently — some capitalize the d, some the s, some use the space, some don’t, some get rid of the da entirely. My use of lowercase for my whole name professionally is in an attempt to neutralize the power of its colonial connotation.
baking
“Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other. ”
