Andrew Aaron Valdez (he/him) is a Drama League Award nominee, certified trauma-informed care professional, educator, multidisciplinary artist, administrator, and DEI consultant from Donna, Texas. Andrew is the Artistic Workshops Manager at New York Theatre Workshop, an educator with the Indigenous Cultures Institute and the TĀNKO Institute, a Steering Committee Member of the Latinx Theatre Commons, and a member of the Latinx Playwrights Circle and the Dramatists Guild. He has been a fellow and resident with Americans for the Arts Arts and Culture Leaders of Color, Cleveland Public Theatre, Julia De Burgos Cultural Arts Center, Cleveland Civic Leadership Institute, Twelve Literary Arts Baldwin House, LORT’s EDI Mentorship Program, NALAC’s Leadership Institute, the Dramatists Guild and Latinx Playwrights Circle Candela Fellowship, artEquity’s BIPOC Leadership Circle, the Cleveland Leadership Center, the Kennedy Center Summer Playwriting Intensive, and the Yale Alumni Association Leadership Forum. He is a Connecticut Artists Respond grantee, a 2025–2026 Artist Fellowship Awardee with the Connecticut Office of the Arts, a 2025–2026 Artistic Research Fellow with the Folger Shakespeare Library, a Green Innovator Cohort Member with the Yale Center for Business and Environment and Tsai Center for Innovation at Yale, a Tsai CITY Accelerator Program participant and Audience Selection Award recipient, an August Coppola Scholar, a Walter McClintock Memorial Fellow at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, a recipient of Yale University and La Casa’s Graduate and Professional School Dean’s Award for Achievement, and was named one of the 100 Cleveland Latinos You Must Know. Andrew is a founding member of DIEZ, a NALAC Fund for the Arts grant awardee Latinx playwrights collective.

His work as a pinata artist has been displayed at the Julia De Burgos Cultural Arts Center, Cleveland Print Room, and Akron Soul Train. As a poet and playwright, his work has been at, supported or developed with Teatro Vivo, Twelve Literary Arts, Heights Arts, The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Kennedy Center, Cleveland Public Theatre, Yale Summer Cabaret, Yale Cabaret, The Playwrights Center, The Orchard Project, Play Penn, The Workshop Theater, The PlayGround Experiment, and Nuyorican Poets Cafe and Bowery Poetry Club, alongside development through the Latinx Playwrights Circle and the Dramatists Guild. His play SolMate was a Semi-Finalist for Fresh Ink Theatre (2025–2026), a Semi-Finalist for La MaMa’s Morgan Jenness Experiments in Playwriting Fellowship (2025) and a Semi-Finalist for Fault Line Theatre’s Irons in the Fire (2024). His play Children of the Valley was a Finalist for Fault Line Theatre’s Irons in the Fire (2025), Alternate for the Ucross Foundation Residency Program (Fall 2025), and is being developed through The Workshop Theater’s 2026 Spring Writers’ Intensive. His work has also been recognized as a Finalist for Reimagine New Plays in TYA, Pipeline Theatre Company’s PlayLab, and New Haven/Elm City Poet Laureate, and he has been selected for The Orchard Project Green Lab and Play Penn’s Playwrights Cohort.

Andrew has served as a consultant with OF/BY/FOR ALL, a Creative Community Builder at Cleveland Play House and contributor to its trauma-informed CARE program, and Yale Repertory Theatre’s Artistic Coordinator and Assistant Director of Marketing. He serves as a judge for Animation and Experimental Film at the Super Short Sweet Film Fest. He was last seen in the 2021 Drama League Award-nominated Off-Broadway production of American Dreams at Working Theatre, written by Leila Buck and directed by Tamilla Woodard.

Andrew is a Terry Foundation alumnus. He earned a BFA in Theatre Studies from the University of Texas at Austin, DEI certificates in organizational leadership and HR from the University of South Florida, Rice University, and UC Irvine, and an MFA from the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale. He is a certified Intimacy Director (accredited by IDC).

@andrewaaronvaldez
www.andrewaaronvaldez.com