Gretchen Suárez-Peña
Gretchen Suárez-Peña
Assistant Professor,
Areas of Expertise: Stage and Screen Writing
Email: gsuarezpena@fau.edu
Office: AL 9, RM 179, Boca Campus
Gretchen Suárez-Peña (she/her) is a Puerto Rican playwright and screenwriter. She received her MFA in Dramatic Writing from Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama (Class of 2024). She is a 2026 Dramatist Guild Foundation National Fellow and a 2026 Candela Playwrights Summer Fellow.
She is currently the book writer for Sometimes Love (music and lyrics by Michael Mott). Her play, Epiphany, was the winner of the 2025 Tampa Bay Theatre Festival Staged Reading competition. Her screenplay, For Such a Time, received the $5,000 Third Place Award in the 2024 Alfred P. Sloan Script Competition at Carnegie Mellon University. Her play, 2052, is part of the Theater Masters Take Ten anthology published through Concord Theatricals.
Her piece Searching for Abuelo was the first-place winner at the 2023 Voices of Women Theatre Festival, the best full-length play at the 2023 Tampa Bay Theatre Festival, and an official selection of the 2024 NYC Downtown Urban Arts Festival and the SheATL Festival. It is currently licensed by SheNYC.
Her show Across the Atlantic opened the 2023 BIPOC Play Reading Series at the Straz Center in Tampa, Florida. Her short play, The Arithmetic of Memory, has been produced across the country and was published in the Stonecoast Review where it was nominated for a Pushcart Award in Drama (2021). It was the 2023 Gary Garrison National Ten-Minute Play Award winner for the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (KCACTF). ÌýHer play, With a Torch of Seven Virtues, was the 2nd Place Latinx Playwriting Award recipient for the 2024 National KCACTF. Her one act, Wingman, was also recognized by KCACTF as a 2023 John Cauble Regional 2 Finalist. Other Awards and Recognitions: Atlanta Musical Theatre Festival, Be Original Festival, Tampa Bay Theatre Festival. A portion of her work is available to be read on the New Play Exchange and she is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild.Ìý
Upcoming Projects: Her musical Sometimes Love, with collaborator Michael Mott and director Peter Flynn, starring Broadway's own Andrea Burns and John Cardoza, will receive an off-Broadway workshop at the York Theatre in its New2NY Series in March 2027. A recent VIP grant recipient, Suárez-Peña, will be engaging with Veterans to study how storytelling enhances resilience and well-being, along with FAU College of Nursing Professor Laurie Martinez. She has also been commissioned to write a new play by the off-Broadway Lucille Lortel Alcove New Play development program. Additional public production and reading information can be found on her website,
Instagram & Facebook: Ìý@playsbygretchen
Linkedin: Gretchen Suarez-Pena