Cara Mía Theatre Co. just received some very happy news, and it's good for audiences, too: The Latinx company is the recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and HowlRound Theatre Commons grant for a playwright-in-residence.

The program provides three years of salary, benefits, and a flexible research and development fund "for a diverse group of American playwrights at selected theaters around the country."

Virginia Grise is the acclaimed playwright who will join Cara Mía's staff full-time in the fall. She penned Your Healing is Killing Me, featured during last season's Latinidades: A Festival of Solo Shows, and blu, presented at Cara Mía in 2015.

"Cara Mía produced my very first solo show, The Panza Monologues, 15 years ago," says Grise. "This residency in many ways feels like a homecoming and I am honored to come home both to Cara Mía and to Texas after being gone for over a decade."

This is only the third time a company in Dallas has received this opportunity. Dallas Theater Center has been granted it twice before, in 2013 and 2016, to bring Will Power on board (his resulting productions included Stagger Lee and Fetch Clay, Make Man).

"Grise's work is a combination of community happenings, community meals, symposiums, technical developmental new play readings, and more," says a Cara Mía representative. "This dynamic is not only exciting to know that she is a leader in this, but this also makes her a perfect resident playwright for Cara Mía, where we look to bind community action with live theater."

"In this moment of global rebellions and a global pandemic, of extreme uncertainty and infinite possibility, I think it is my responsibility as an artist to make politically urgent work, to imagine, create, and build new worlds deeply rooted in the collective questioning, daily practice, and embodiment of what it means to be free," says Grise.