Carmen Aguirre is a Vancouver-based theatre artist who has written and co-written twenty plays, including Chile Con Carne, The Trigger and The Refugee Hotel. She has over sixty film, television and stage acting credits, and is currently appearing as Alcina on Showcase’s Endgame. Carmen is also a theatre director, acting teacher and a Theatre of the Oppressed workshop facilitator, working with communities around British Columbia.

Carmen started writing plays while still in theatre school. Her first play, In A Land Called I Don’t Remember, was political in a highly personal way, and almost all of the plays she’s written since have drawn on her experiences as an exile and activist.

Although Carmen found her calling as an actor and storyteller at the age of three, when her parents took her to the circus in the south of Chile she decided to dedicate her youth to the Chilean revolutionary movement, running a safe house for underground resistance members seeking refuge in Argentina, and doing routine border runs into Pinochet’s Chile. She decided to go to theatre school and dedicate her life to her artistic calling after Pinochet fell, when she was twenty-two years old.

Something Fierce, a Canada Reads 2012 contender, is her first book. It is a book she wrote in her head for twenty years, but only found the courage to write on paper in the last few.

Carmen is a recipient of the Playwrights’ Theatre Centre Best New Play Award (for The Refugee Hotel), and has been nominated for the Jessie Richardson Theatre Award, the Dora Mavor Moore Award and the prestigious Siminovitch Prize. She is a graduate of Studio 58.