César Alvarez

CÉSAR ALVAREZ (they/them) is a composer, lyricist, playwright, and performance maker. They create large experimental musicals as non-normative possibility spaces for embodiment, inter-dimensionality, socio-political transformation, kinship and coexistence. With a background as a jazz saxophonist, band leader and sound artist, César’s work inhabits a space between the worlds of theater, music and performance art. César has written five full-length musicals, FUTURITY (2016 Lortel Award for Outstanding Musical); The Elementary Spacetime Show; The Universe is a Small Hat; NOISE (a commission of The Public Theater); and The Potluck. César also composed the music for Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon (Soho Rep, TFANA. Drama Desk Nomination), and The Foundry Theater’s Good Person of Szechwan (LaMaMa, The Public Theater. Drama Desk Nomination). In 2015 César co-founded Polyphone, a festival of new and emerging musicals at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and served as Artistic Director for five seasons. César was a 2018-20 Princeton Arts Fellow, 2020-22 Hermitage Fellow, a recipient of The Jonathan Larson Award in 2016 and the Kleban Prize in Musical Theatre for Lyrics in 2022. César is currently under commission at Playwright’s Horizons and Denver Theater Center and an Assistant Professor of Music at Dartmouth College.