Carmelita
Tropicana
She // Her // Hers
[ID: Alina, an older woman with short hair, smiles. She is wearing a shiny blue jacket and small silver hoop earrings.]
New York, NY
2021 USA Fellow
This award was generously supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.
_
Alina Troyano, a.k.a. Carmelita Tropicana, has been performing in New York’s downtown arts scene since the 1980s, straddling the worlds of performance art and theater with irreverent humor, subversive fantasy, and bilingual puns. Tropicana’s current online works include Pandemic Fight for the Theater for One Project and Rad Women for Pandemic Times for Park Avenue Armory’s 100 Years/100 Women.
She is a Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of an Obie Award for theater. She has also received awards from Creative Capital, Anonymous Was a Woman, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is currently an artist in residence at New York’s Soho Rep. Project Number One. Her publications include Memories of the Revolution: The First 10 Years of the WOW Café Theater (2015), edited with Holly Hughes and Jill Dolan, and Carmelita Tropicana: Performing Between Cultures (2000). She was an original member of the WOW collective and served on the Board of Directors of PS New York, formerly PS 122 (1998–2016). Since 2015, Tropicana has served on the board of the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Portrait photo by Carlos David.