Khristián E. Méndez Aguirre

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Khristián E. Méndez Aguirre is a theater artist-scholar from Guatemala City. His award-winning practice as a director and researcher foregrounds the relationship between the stage and the communities that surround the stage through strange, engrossing combinations. His artistic inquiry has taken many shapes developed through collaboration and partnerships: plays crafty plants about vegetative states and grief; pop-up book aesthetic plays about lucha libre and gender equality; coffee-shop themed plays that explore gentrification. As a scholar, his work articulates the relationship between environmental justice and theatrical interventions that function as eco-dramaturgies. He's presented his research at both academic and professional conferences including the TCG National Conference, World Stage Design, ATHE, and ASTR. His work as an artist and a researcher merges pedagogically through arts-integrated facilitation and curriculum planning. At UT Austin, he co-developed an innovative model of artist fellowships for climate resilience as part of the Planet Texas 2050 Grand Challenge. An avid grant-writer, he's funded his work and research with over $130,000 in University and City funding.

He's currently a Provost's Early Career Fellow and a Ph.D. Candidate in Performance as Public Practice at UT Austin, and this year he also founded his theater company, Teatro de la Tierra. Recent directing work includes Manuela Infante's Estado Vegetal (Teatro Espacio & Zilker Botanical Garden); Year of the Tiger (Texas Theater and Dance); Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' Everybody (The New Materialists). B.A.: Human Ecology, College of the Atlantic; M.F.A.: Performance as Public Practice, UT Austin.

This information is accurate as of their last semester spent teaching.

Research on Youth-led Climate Change Dramaturgy, co-developed with Nic Bennett

Database of Peer-reviewed sources on Performance and Ecology

Watch a Panel Discussion for Planet Texas 2050: Revealing the Invisible Systems that Support Us

Staging Mr. Burns, a post-electric play With Zero Waste | Austin Chronicle, December 2018