Esperanza Rosales Balcárcel (she/they) is Guatemalan playwright born in Guatemala City and raised in Norwalk, CT.
Esperanza is the recipient of the Princeton Ward Prize for Fiction and Outstanding Achievement in Theater Prize, the Eugene O’Neill Memorial Scholarship from the Yale School of Drama, the Paul Greene Award from the National Theatre Conference, and is a proud member of the third generation of the Kilroys collective. Her play, Color Boy, received the Kennedy Center’s Latinx Playwriting Award and Paula Vogel Playwriting Award (finalist), an Honorable Mention for the 2024 Relentless Award, a nomination for the 2025 Venturous Playwright Fellowship from the Playwright’s Center, and was named the Connecticut State Winner for New England’s Clauder Prize from Portland Stage. Her play, Lupe Finds Me in the Garden of Dreams, was a finalist for the Leah Ryan Prize, the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, the Van Lier Fellowship for New Voices at Rattlestick Theater, and the Ground Floor Development Lab at Berkeley Rep. Lupe Finds Me was developed through New York Theater Workshop’s 2024 Summer Dartmouth Residency, was presented at the 2024 Breaking the Binary Theatre Festival at Playwrights Horizons, and received an honorable mention for the 47th Bay Area Playwright’s Festival. She is a two-time nominee for the Ollie Award and finalist for the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, a nominee for the L. Arnold Weissberger New Play Award and the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and is a contributor to the second volume of Methuen Drama’s Anthology of Trans Plays. Most recently, she had the honor of being the Featured Playwright-In-Residence for the 2025 Julie Lutz Cold Reads Festival of New American Plays at Syracuse Stage, and her new play, Lux & Rex Are The Brightest Things In This Forsaken World, was presented at Checkmark Production’s Summer Reading Series at INTAR in August.
She is currently a Teaching Artist for the Public Theater, an IB Theater Advisor at Brooklyn Prospect Charter High School, and is a full-time Lecturer on the Playwriting Faculty here at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, where she produces and mentors the playwrights working on the Carlotta Festival, Langston Hughes Festival of New Plays, and the first-year New Play Lab. During her time at Yale, she proudly served as Co-Artistic Director for the Yale Summer Cabaret and was a teaching artist at Wilbur Cross High School and through the Dwight Edgewood Project.
BA: Princeton, MFA: Yale