Quiara Alegría Hudes

Quiara Alegría Hudes, born September 22, 1977, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is an American playwright, producer, lyricist, essayist, and screenwriter. Raised in West Philadelphia by a Jewish father and a Puerto Rican mother, she has described herself as being of Puerto Rican and Jewish heritage while noting that she was raised by two Puerto Rican parents, as her birth parents separated and her stepfather was a Puerto Rican entrepreneur. She began writing and composing music during childhood and studied piano with Dolly Krasnopolsky at the Mary Louise Curtis Branch of Settlement Music School. Hudes went on to attend Central High School in Philadelphia before enrolling at Yale University as a first-generation college student, where she earned a BA in music composition in 1999. She later completed an MFA in playwriting at Brown University in 2004. She is a resident writer at New Dramatists and a former Page 73 Playwriting Fellow.

Hudes launched her playwriting career with Yemaya's Belly, which earned the 2003 Clauder Competition for New England Playwriting, the Paula Vogel Award in Playwriting, and the Kennedy Center/ACTF Latina Playwriting Award. The play received productions at Miracle Theatre in 2004 and at both Portland Stage Company and Signature Theatre in 2005. Her next work, Elliot, a Soldier's Fugue, premiered at Page 73 Productions at the Off-Broadway Culture Project in 2006 and also ran at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta that same year. The play was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and was conceived as the first installment of what would become the Elliot Trilogy.

Hudes is perhaps most widely recognized for writing the book for In the Heights, a Broadway musical created in collaboration with Lin-Manuel Miranda, who composed the music and lyrics. The original Off-Broadway production received the Lucille Lortel Award and the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Musical, was named Best Musical by New York magazine, earned a Best of 2007 designation from The New York Times, and received the Hispanic Organization of Latin Actors HOLA Award for Outstanding Achievement in Playwriting. The Broadway production won the 2008 Tony Award for Best Musical, and Hudes received a Tony Award nomination for Best Book of a Musical that same year. The production was also a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Hudes subsequently wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of In the Heights, which premiered in 2021.

The second play in the Elliot Trilogy, Water by the Spoonful, premiered at Hartford Stage Company and won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play returns to characters from Elliot, a Soldier's Fugue and unfolds across scenes set in an online chat room alongside scenes depicting face-to-face interaction. The trilogy concluded with The Happiest Song Plays Last, which received its world premiere at the Goodman Theater in Chicago on April 13, 2013, and was subsequently produced Off-Broadway at Second Stage in March 2014, directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson with set design by Michael Carnahan, costumes by Karen Perry, lighting by Rui Rita, and sound by Leon Rothenberg.

Among her other works, Hudes wrote the children's musical Barrio Grrrrl!, performed at the Kennedy Center in 2009, and her play 26 Miles had its world premiere at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta in March 2009, directed by Kent Gash. Daphne's Dive premiered Off-Broadway at Signature Theatre on May 16, 2016, directed by Thomas Kail and featuring Samira Wiley, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Vanessa Aspillaga, and Carlos Gomez. That same year, The Good Peaches, described as a girl-versus-nature musical play originally performed by 56 orchestral musicians, three actors, and eight dancers, was presented at the Cleveland Play House in April 2016. Also in 2016, Miss You Like Hell, a musical for which Hudes wrote the book and Erin McKeown composed the music, opened at La Jolla Playhouse in October, directed by Lear deBessonet and starring Daphne Rubin-Vega. Lulu's Golden Shoes was produced by Flashpoint Theater Company in Philadelphia in 2015. Hudes also served as screenwriter for Vivo, an animated musical film produced by Lin-Manuel Miranda that was released on Netflix on August 6, 2021.

Beyond the stage and screen, Hudes published her first children's book, In My Neighborhood, through Arthur Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., in 2010. That same year she was named a Fellow by United States Artists. On October 27, 2011, she became the first Latina woman inducted into Central High School's Alumni Hall of Fame. In 2012, she served as a visiting playwright at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and returned in 2014 as the Shapiro Distinguished Professor of Writing and Theater, a position she held through 2017.