Samantha Galarza is a queer, mixed-race, Puerto Rican, SAG-AFTRA actress/writer/singer/performance artist/educator/ director. As an art-ivist, her work explores queer identity politics, fluidity, gender, systemic and internalized racism, love, substance abuse, migration, the U.S. prison industrial complex and policy that disproportionately affects ethnic minorities. Her work has been published in award winning anthologies and performed throughout the U.S. and internationally.
Ultimately a storyteller, her dream is to bridge the gap between mainstream media and progressive "de-colonial" political art. Samantha is an alum of Rutgers University, the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics’ EmergeNYC program, and a fellow of Guillermo Gomez Pena’s La Pocha Nostra and EmergeLab residency at Brooklyn Arts Exchange. She is also co-founder of the performance collective A Beautiful Desperation and a member of Alternate Roots.
Samantha Galarza
Director, Eddie's Perejil
“Eddie’s Perejil” is a gripping solo written and performed by Edward Paulino about a working-class Dominican-American college student who stumbles upon a document describing a long-forgotten genocide against Haitians by Dominicans known as the 1937 Haitian Massacre, el Corte, and temwayaj kout kouto. This discovery and subsequent self-reflection sets him on an inescapable collision course with his romanticized notion of what it means to be Dominican in the diaspora.