Consultant

Photo: Antonio De Lucci

C. QUINTANA, or CQ (pronouns: she/her, any) is a queer writer with Cuban and Louisiana roots. There is "other" and "in-between" in all of us; CQ tells stories that mine the misconception of dissimilarity and proclaim, "You are not alone."

Her plays and musicals have been developed and produced with companies including Barrington Stage Company, Southern Rep, INTAR, Lark Play Development Center, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Astoria Performing Arts Center, and more. Her play Scissoring is published and available for licensing via Dramatists Play Service and a monologue from AZUL, which was featured on the 2017 Kilroys List and had its world premiere at Southern Rep as part of the 2019 Tennessee Williams/Saints and Sinners Literary Festival, is published in The Kilroys List: Volume 2. For more, visit NPX.

CQ's poetry, fiction, and lyric nonfiction is published or forthcoming in Santa Clara Review, Wildness Journal, OnCuba, Nimrod Journal, Foglifter, great weather for MEDIA, and beyond. She is the author of the poetry chapbook The Heart Wants (Finishing Line Press), and her poem "She-lium" was featured on Radiolab's "Elements" episode in collaboration with Emotive Fruition.

CQ's hour-long dystopian drama pilot, Invisible Lily, appeared on the WeForShe "Ones to Watch" List, and she served as Staff Writer on the ABC television series The Baker and the Beauty. She is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from WP Theater, MacDowell (Ernest and Red Heller Fellow), Playwrights Realm, Van Lier/New Voices at The Lark, CubaOne, Queer/Art, and Lambda Literary, as well as commissions from Audible, The Civilians, Palo Alto Playhouse, EST/Alfred P. Sloan Project, Peppercorn Theatre Company, and more. She holds an MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University.

writing.

plays.

AZUL

(World Premiere: Southern Rep 2019) Spanning two countries and three generations, AZUL fuses music and memory to ask: what is the true language of love?

CITIZEN SCIENTIST

(Second Prize Barrington Stage Company Burman New Play Award) Neema, an astronomer, meet exploring the starfield for exoplanets and battling their recent losses. Together, they discover a planet and learn what it means to be present here on Earth.

ENTER YOUR SLEEP

(Yale Cabaret, 2018) Childhood best friends, meet in a wild night of dreams to unravel their complex friendship, battle their sadness, and, ultimately, face a looming, dark truth.

EVENSONG

(World Premiere: Astoria Performing Arts Center, 2016) Teo works as a bank teller, goes on mediocre online dates, and searches for stability and connection while navigating the tangled shelter system.

THE GREAT LONELY ROAMER AND THE NIGHT THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING

(Featured in inaugural NYU Voices Festival with The Movement, 2017) On New Year’s Eve, a polar bear arrives in suburban Texas in search of a new home, while his sister winds up in New York City to track him down. What follows: a night that will impact the future of an entire species...

SCISSORING

(Available via Dramatists Play Service; World Premiere: INTAR, 2018) When Abigail Bauer takes a job as a teacher at a conservative Catholic school, she is forced to step back into the closet. As she struggles to reconcile her professional ambitions, personal relationships, religious beliefs, and internalized shame, she must find the courage to be unabashedly herself.

TOBIAS: a novel in performance

(Slated for WP Pipeline Festival, 2020) Tobias was a real person; far more than footnote in one of North America's earliest-known scandals. Melding the forms of narrative-fiction and playwriting, TOBIAS explores a distinct connection across three backgrounds: Mohawk, African, and Dutch, and examines the complicated lines between power, sex, and love.

THREE THOUSAND SEIZURES

(CEAD Residency, 2017) New York advertising exec Petra Hourani battles her escalating epilepsy symptoms and impending neurosurgery. Haunted by her personified seizures, who is she with them and who is she without them?

FOR YOUNG AUDIENCES

Write for more information re: licensing of CQ's TYA work, including Flor to Somewhere, Música, Música, Máximo, Música (Peppercorn Theatre), Amiga Duende (Palo Alto Playhouse), and The Literate Mermaid (Girl Tales)