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TeatroStageFest is an annual production of Latino International Theater Festival of New York, Inc., a non-profit organization that actively supported New York Latino theater year-round, and served as a portal to Ibero-American theater companies from around the world. It was co-founded by Susana Tubert and José W. Fernández in 2005. Fernández was a member of mayor Michael Bloomberg's NYC Latin Media & Entertainment Commission. Working to promote New York City as the center of Latin entertainment, they recognized the need to spotlight the Latino Theater on the New York City Theater scene and TeatroStageFest was a result of their efforts to bring it to light.

Susana Tubert was an established producer of film, television, and theater in New York City, with extensive experience in Hispanic entertainment. She was approached by José W. Fernandez in 2005 to chair the Latino International Theater Festival of New York, Inc., to which she has dedicated her time for the last seven years.

Suzanne Sutro, AICP, is a senior community planner with the Montgomery Planning Commission in Norristown, Pennsylvania.

Sina Sutter (b.1951) is an Orlando based Cuban-American visual artist and educator originally from Matanzas, Cuba. Her works, many of them landscapes and composites, weave in themes that relate to her Cuban roots through the use of color and choice of subject.

Sutter began exploring her passion for creating art when she was seven years old. In an interview, she states that she was driven by her love for nature and all living things to become an artist.

In 1962, when Sutter was just 11 years old, her family fled Cuba. They arrived in Miami eight years later in 1970. At age 18, Sutter put her artistic skills to work as a scenic artist at major entertainment venues and corporations, including the Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus World, and Vision Enterprises. She also worked as a potter at Axner Ceramics, and as a miniaturist on the "White House in Miniature," which was exhibited worldwide, as well as many other projects. In 1981, she opened an art gallery, the Tropic Art Design, with a business partner and her husband Ben Sutter.

During the 1980’s, Sutter reconnected with her roots, which changed the course of her future work and was the starting point for the decade-long development of her artistic style and philosophy. This new turn in her life as an artist put her identity as a Latina front and center. She especially explored the textures, colors, styles, and locations that are unique to Cuban culture and important to Cuban identity and nationality. Her embrace of her roots did not make her work less accessible to audiences, but rather produced “a style that is sometimes complex yet able to reach people at many different levels.” Many of the titles of her works are bilingual in both Spanish and English. Sutter’s artist statement exemplifies her belief in art’s connection to the living world and personal identity:

"Art is the essence of feeling in its diverse forms. It includes the broadest aspects of life and how each singular personality manifests its perception of each existing experience by means of an aesthetic and comfortable wrapper that stimulates the imagination."

(Su filosofía artística: Arte es la esencia de los sentimientos en sus diversas formas, llevados a las exposiciones más amplias de la vida, en la cual se manifiestan cada una de las personalidades y su manera de sentir frente cada situación existente; mediante una envoltura estética y confortable que desarrolla la imaginación del hombre.)

Sutter has also worked with government grants and initiatives on behalf of women and the Latinx community. She is a past member of the Board of Directors of the Women’s Caucus for Art and was the Chair of the Latina Caucus. She worked with the National Hispanic Leadership Institute creating the posters for the 2000 and 2002 Mujer Award, and from 1999 to 2008 at the National Hispana Leadership Institute (NHLI) Mujer Awards Gala, in Orlando, Florida, La Jolla, California, San Antonio, Texas, and Denver, Colorado. She also worked with the Smithsonian Center for Latino Initiatives event for Women's History Month (2001), for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2003, 2004), and for UNIFEM's fundraising event for the women of Afghanistan (2004).

Sutter has had her work exhibited all around the country including at the Epcot Guest relations lobby since October 2002, and in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, and in Florida at Walt Disney and other locations in Orlando. Her work has been featured in the following exhibitions: Ritmos Místicos (Mystic Rhythms), City Hall, Casselbury, FL in 2011; Art Buyers Caravan, Atlanta, GA, Chicago, IL, Orlando, FL, and Los Angeles, CA from 1987-1997; Latin American Art in Orlando, Terrace Gallery, City Hall, Orlando, FL; Art Expo, Convention Center, Los Angeles, CA; Professional Pictures Framers Association, Las Vegas, NV; Art Expo, Galleria, New York, NY; The Year of the Ox, Orlando, Terrace Gallery, City Hall, Orlando, FL; Celebrating Hispanic Heritage, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL; Archivers Exhibitions, Celebration of Hispanic Art, The Plaza Hotel, New York, NY; The 10th Annual National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in American Higher Education, Lake Buena Vista, FL; Great Southern Gallery, Key West, FL; Diversity, Disney’s Coronado Springs Resort, Orlando, FL; Ofrendas, Border Crossings: Voices of the Past (Installation), Maitland Art Center, Maitlan, FL; Latin Colors Reflexions, Casselberry, FL; The Hispanic 100 (Honoree and Exhibitor), Disney’s Boardwalk Resort, Lake Buena Vista, FL; and Valencia Community College, Orlando, FL.

Sutter has won awards for her creative work including the People’s Choice Award at the Osceola Art Center at the Creativa Art Show, exhibited at the Mexican Consulate in Orlando celebrating Frida Kahlo’s life, and successfully completed an Art & Development Partnership with CREOG APGO, a Medical Education Conference.

During her career, Sutter worked not only as an artist, but as an educator. Sutter founded the Learn to Be Creative and Art Mindfulness Series professional workshops that provided creative outlets and education in corporate settings. She also led workshops at the Family Leadership Institute, Educational Achievement Services, Learning to be Creative Seminar, Empowerment Works, and Chronic Diseases Stress Management Program in Orlando and Miami.

Caridad Svich is an award-winning playwright, director, actor, composer, translator, and educator. She is considered one of the most prolific contemporary Latinx American playwrights. Svich was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. on July 30, 1963 to Cuban-Argentine-Spanish-Croatian parents. She notes that her frequent moves from Pennsylvania to New Jersey, Florida, North Carolina, Utah, New York, and California among other travels and “living between cultures” has “instilled a nomadic strain” in her, which “has become an inevitable part of [her] writing vision.” She says that, “visions of migration (both physical and spiritual) dominate the plays, which have become, in turn, documents of internal diasporas. As a playwright, songwriter, editor and translator living between many cultures, including inherited ones, the idea of departure has always been not only an actual or metaphorical basis for writing the work.” In fact, during her career Svich continued to travel throughout the United States and internationally to places as varied as Traverse Theater in Edinburgh and the Royal Court Theater and Paines Plough Theater in London, Greece, Argentina and the US-Cuba Writer's Conference in Havana.

Svich earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 1985 and her Master of Fine Arts at the University of California, San Diego in theatre-playwriting in 1988. In 1988, she became a student of María Irene Fornés’ Latino playwriting workshop in New York, followed by playwright residencies at INTAR, Theater Communications Group, Lake Placid Institute for the Arts, and a 7-year residency with the New Dramatists in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan, N.Y. In 1990, Svich directed a production of But There Are Fires for INTAR Hispanic Playwrights in Residence Laboratory Festival. In 2000, she acted in a production of Scar at Perishable Theater in Providence, Rhode Island. She also created the Original Score for Alchemy of Desire/ Dead Man's Blues (Text with Songs) which was performed at the Hal B. Wallis Theater in Evanston Illinois and William and Mary Theater in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Svich has written over forty full-length plays and fifteen translations as well as other short works. She says that “Explorations of wanderlust, dispossession, biculturalism, bilingualism, construction of identity, and the many different emotional terrains that can be inhabited onstage form the basis of my plays and other writing projects.” Her full-length works produced include: Agua de luna (psalms for the rouge), Alchemy of Desire/Dead-Man’s Blues (a play with songs), A Little Betrayal Among Friends, Any Place But Here, Archipelago, Aunt Julia & the Scriptwriter, The Booth Variations, Brazo Gitano [text with songs], The Breath of Stars, Corazon Eterno (always in my heart), DE TROYA, Fugitive Pieces (a play with songs), FUEL, GERTIE AND ALICE BY THE SEA, Guapa, Hide Sky, The House of the Spirits/La Casa de los Espiritus, In the time of the Butterflies/En el tiempo de las mariposas, Instructions for Breathing, Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart (a rave fable), JARMAN (all this maddening beauty), Love in the Time of Cholera/El Amor en los Tiempos de Colera, The Labyrinth of Desire, Magnificent Waste, The Orphan Sea, RED BIKE, Sanctuary (American Psalm), SPARK, Thrush (a play with slaughter songs), TOWN HALL, The Tropic of X, Trouble in Kind, Turn the Dark Up, Bow Down, This is a Hymn, Twelve Ophelias (a play with broken songs), Prodigal Kiss [text with songs], The Way of Water, Wreckage, Upon the Fragile Shore. She has also adapted for the stage novels by Mario Vargas Llosa, Julia Alvarez and Jose Leon Sanchez, and has radically reconfigured works from Wedekind, Euripides, Sophocles, and Shakespeare. Her plays have been directed by Annie Castledine, Maria Irene Fornes, Lisa Peterson, Neel Keller, William Carden, Nick Philippou, Annie Dorsen, Katie Pearl, Stephen Wrentmore, Daniella Topol and Jose Zayas, among many others.

About Svich’s work, Lillian Manzor writes: “The themes, styles and concerns that shape Svich’s dramaturgy are: a critique of the American Dream and a constant search for home through the prism of diaspora and migration; the mixing of rituals and traditional cultural elements from the Americas with global pop culture; obtuse treatment of love and desire; and a poetic and nonrealistic use of language and musical elements.Svich’s characters survive by becoming “professional” nomads. Like their creator, they find themselves at the intersection of identities. As hybrids or transcultural beings, they live in a United States that is figured as the borderlands, a consumer society inhabited by nomads and the dispossessed. She writes from the position of a Latina, and there is a Latina sensibility or affect in all of her oeuvre. Her plays, however, defy and question the simple categorization or easy boxing of Latinas and Latinos both in content and in form. She stages the drama of her characters in such a way that they become an expressionistic allegory of the uncertainty of post-modern times: displaced human beings reconfigure the maps of home in a nonlinear fashion so that we can inhabit our imagined and imaginary communities of Mexico-Hollywood-Buenos Aires-Granada-Havana-New York.” (Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the United States. Volume 1. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005 (184-6)

In 2003, while Svich was a TCG/Pew National Theatre Resident Artist at INTAR in New York City, she founded NoPassport, an unincorporated, artist-driven, grass-roots theatre alliance & press devoted to cross-cultural, Pan-American performance, theory, action, advocacy, and publication. NoPassport exists as a virtual and live forum for the exchange of work and dreams, a network between theatres and the academy, and a mobile band of playwrights, directors, actors, producers and musicians and provides mentoring for young artists. Early stages of NoPassport developed in New York City and Brooklyn at Little Theatre at Tonic, Low Bar and BRIC, and at the Playwrights Center of Minneapolis, the latter where Svich had done a residency post-MFA. She has also published over twenty titles with NoPassport Press by authors as diverse as Todd London, John Jesurun, David Greenspan, Carson Kreitzer, Rinde Eckert, Lenora Champagne and Octavio Solis. NoPassport has also responded with creative action to incidents such as the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the US Gulf region, the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting, and Climate Change. For example, with the work After Orlando: an international theatre action, a collective of over seventy playwrights from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom (England and Wales), Australia, and Uganda. Women, men, genderqueer playwrights, LGTBQ, Latinx, Latin@, playwrights of many colors and ethnicities was presented at more than thirty theatres and colleges, universities, and high schools across the U.S. and UK in the fall of 2016. In addition to her work with NoPassport Press, she is the Associate Editor, and Editor of BackPages, Contemporary Theatre Review theatre and performance journal in the UK, and since 2004, a Contributing Editor to TheatreForum, an international theatre and performance journal, UC-San Diego and the Drama Editor of Asymptote literary translation journal.

Svich has maintained a career as a theatrical translator, chiefly of the dramatic work of Federico Garcia Lorca, published in Federico García Lorca: impossible theater: five plays and thirteen poems; in new translations by Caridad Svich (Smith & Kraus, 2000), Lorca Major Plays Volume I, and Lorca: Major Plays Volume II (NoPassport Press), as well as works by Calderon de la Barca, Lope de Vega, Julio Cortazar, Victor Rascon Banda, Antonio Buero Vallejo and contemporary works from Mexico, Cuba and Spain. She is the editor of a number of publications including Conducting a Life: Reflections on the Theatre of Maria Irene Fornes, Smith & Kraus, NH (1999), Out of the Fringe: Contemporary Latina/o Theatre and Performance (2000), Theatre in Crisis? Performance Manifestos for a New Century, Manchester University Press, UK/Palgrave Macmillan, USA (2002), Trans-Global Readings: Crossing Theatrical Boundaries, conversations on media, culture, language and performance, Manchester University Press, UK/Palgrave Macmillan, USA (2004), Divine Fire: Eight Contemporary Plays Inspired by the Greeks, Back Stage Books (an imprint of Watson-Guptill), NY (2005) Emerging Territories: Latino/a Theatre and Performance, special issue eds. Caridad Svich and Maria Delgado, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Vol. 16, No. 3, CUNY Grad Center, NY (Fall 2004), Popular Forms for a Radical Theatre, special issue, Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol.16, No. 8, Routledge, UK (2006), Out of Silence: Censorship in Theatre & Performance, Eyecorner Press, Denmark and USA (2012), The Breath of Theatre 2003-2013, conversations with artists and critical reflections, NoPassport Press, CA (2013), Innovation in Five: Strategies for Theatre & Performance (2015).

In 2019, Svich was shortlisted for the American Shakespeare Center's Shakespeare's New Contemporaries Prize. She won both the Ellen Stewart Award for Career Achievement in Professional Theatre from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) and a Tanne Foundation Award in 2018. Other theatre awards and fellowships include the National Latino Playwriting Award (2013), OBIE Award for Lifetime Achievement (2012), Edgerton Foundation New Play Award (2012), American Theatre Critics Association Primus Prize (2011), and HOLA Award for Playwriting (2009). Earlier awards include the Whitfield Cook Prize for New Writing at New Dramatists (2007), National Latino Playwriting Award (2003), TCG/PEW National Theatre Artist Residency at INTAR (2002-2003), Radcliffe Institute fellowship at Harvard University (2002-2003), Jonathan R. Reynolds Playwright in Residence at Denison University (2002), Thurber House Fellow at Ohio State University (2001), NEA/TCG Playwriting Residency at the Mark Taper Forum Theatre (1996-1997), and Rosenthal New Play Prize at Cincinnati Playhouse (1994).