Marisol Rosa-Shapiro // Marisol Soledad // Marisol is a theater artist, educator, and group facilitator working in NYC and Philadelphia, PA.  She endeavors to cultivate empathy, thoughtfulness, playfulness, awareness, listening, agency, and community in every room she enters.

She is an actress, director, mover, shaker, mime, clown, collaborator, producer, world traveller, teaching artist, lover of love, fighter for justice, and creator of theatrical space.

Marisol is a graduate of Princeton University and of Giovanni Fusetti's Helikos: Scuola Internazionale di Creazione Teatrale in Florence, Italy, where her studies were based on the pedagogy of Jacques Lecoq.

Marisol has engaged her passion for community-driven art making with a variety of theaters and arts organizations across the country. She lead the community engagement work for Theatre Horizon’s “Our Norristown,” a Pew-supported collaboration between Artistic Director Nell Bang-Jensen, playwright Micheal John Garcés, and members of the Norristown, PA community. Marisol also recently served as Shakespeare in Clark Park’s Director of Community Engagement for the Park Plays initiative in 2019-2021, Pericles in 2021, and The Taming in 2022.

Marisol currently serves on the Board of Directors of Clowns Without Borders, USA, with whom she has been a proud volunteer performer and teacher for one project with migrants in Tijuana, Mexico, and two projects working with unaccompanied Mexican and Central American minors being detained in San Antonio, Texas. She was also part of the steering committee for TYA/USA’s BIPOC in TYA affinity group, and the Anti-Racism Strategy Committee for the New42/New Victory Theater in NYC.

Marisol’s work has received support from Seattle’s Office of Arts and Culture, Philadelphia’s Office of Arts, Culture, and Creative Economy, the Stockton Rush Bartol Foundation, and the Network of Ensemble Theatres. She was selected as a 2023 Leadership Institute Fellow with the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures and has received fellowships and distinctions from TYA/USA and International Performing Arts for Youth.

In 2022, Marisol co-created and performed in The Most Important Place in The World, an anti-colonial fantasia on Puerto Rican Diasporic themes, with Nathaniel Justiniano of Naked Empire Bouffon Company. The work premiered in Chelsea, MA, was selected as a supported BIPOC New Works Track Panel Pick in Philadelphia’s Cannonball Festival, and was named one of the best plays of 2022 by the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Marisol's red nose clown solo show, Here At Home, premiered in the storefront art gallery of a tattoo parlor in Philadelphia during the 2015 Fringe Arts Festival, and has since played in the New York International Clown Theater Festival at The Brick in Brooklyn; the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble's Women's Solo Theater Festival; at Phillips Academy in Andover, MA; at Feast Arts Center in Tacoma, WA and at 18th & Union Arts Space in Seattle.

While living in Seattle, Marisol conceived, and directed and co-created In SEAtu: Seattle a series of four short, satirical works in the grotesque bouffon style, each of which uncovers the complex history of one of four Seattle icons: Rain & Coffee & Salmon & Weed. This work received a City Artist grant from the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture.

Marisol’s New York-based theater company, Soledad Ensemble, is currently developing The Seven Ravens Project, which weaves together a little-known Grimm Brothers tale and the epic journeys of contemporary child migrants and refugees across the world.  The Seven Ravens Project has been developed in residence at the New Victory Theater’s LabWorks program (2018), and received a Travel Grant from the Network of Ensemble Theaters to support a week-long residency at Barn Arts Collective in Bass Harbor, Maine.  The project has also been developed at Drop Forge &Tool Creative Residency in Hudson, NY, and has presented excerpts at Hunter College Campus Schools and at the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene’s Immigrant Arts Summit.

Marisol's recent performance work includes Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble’s Airness; Shakespeare in Clark Park’s COVID-era pageant wagon play Every Everyman; various Zoom-based, interactive performances for kids with Adventure Players Live; Spellbound Theatre’s Shakespeare’s Stars and Wink for the very young and The Last Coin, a storytelling show for youth; Barn Arts Collective’s four-actor Twelfth Night, in which she played Viola, Sebastian and Maria, in a bilingual performance; and Convergences Theatre Collective’s movement-, dance- and acrobatics-based Babel.

Marisol served for three summers as a managing board member and Artistic Director of Princeton Summer Theater. She was a directing and producing assistant at McCarter Theatre Center where she directed an original, student-written play for the Youth Ink! Playwrights Festival; served as the Assistant Director to Daniel Fish, Emily Mann, and Mary Zimmerman; and enjoyed the mentorship of former McCarter Producing Director Mara Isaacs (Octopus Theatricals). She has also been an assistant director to Daniel Fish at Yale Rep and to Stephen McKinley Henderson at Signature Theater (NYC).

Marisol has been awarded several creative residencies at Drop Forge & Tool in Hudson, NY, and is a member of DF&T's inaugural Z-Forge theater devisers team, which brings together theater makers from the East and West coasts to collaborate over a long weekend once a year over a series of summers.

She has served as a teaching artist with the New Victory Theater, Tectonic Theater Project, TADA! Youth Theater, At The Well Young Women's Leadership Academy, LeAp NYC, Phillips Academy Andover, Seeds of Peace Summer Camp Educators Program, Sitka Fine Arts Camp in Sitka, Alaska, Seattle Children's Theater, Seattle Rep, ArtsCorps, Triangle Associates, The 5th Avenue Theatre, Village Theater in Everett, WA, and Centrum in Port Townsend, WA.

Marisol also employs creation, play and art-making in group facilitation processes for youth and adults across a range of professional contexts. With her partner, ceramic artist George Rodriguez, Marisol served as a co-facilitator for arts-based engagement activities surrounding a city-funded feasibility study on the creation of a new Latinx art space in the Seattle area. She has also offered professional development classes for educators and professionals through Princeton University, The New Victory Theater, Seattle Rep, and the Seattle Children’s Theater.  

Contact Me

marisolwriting@gmail.com
www.marisolmakes.com