About

I was born in San Diego, California, the son of a Mexican-American father and a Colombian mother. I grew up in Southern California and originally trained for a life in the theatre. After studying theatre at the University of Southern California and later at Cornell University, I spent many years working professionally as an actor, director, playwright, and performer.

The Old Globe

After leaving Cornell, I spent a summer season as an intern at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego. While there, I performed a small role in a workshop of Into the Woods. Being in the same room with Stephen Sondheim was something I had dreamed about as a young theatre artist. At the same time, I became involved with Teatro Meta, then a new initiative at the Globe working with San Diego's Spanish-speaking community. Looking back, those two experiences represented very different sides of the theatre world I was beginning to explore: the excitement of working inside a major professional theatre and the possibilities of using theatre to reach communities that were not necessarily being reached by its mainstage work.

Professional Theatre

After my internship at the Old Globe, I began working professionally in theatres around the United States, including San Diego, Los Angeles, Berkeley, Anchorage, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and New York. Over time, I became increasingly interested not only in performing, but in how theatre was made and who got to participate in making it.

Ping Chong and Company

An important turning point came in Milwaukee, where I worked as a member of the repertory company and met Ping Chong. That connection eventually took me to New York to work with Ping Chong and Company. My years with the company changed the way I thought about making theatre. I began to question the traditional hierarchy that separated the roles of actor, writer, director, and choreographer. As company members, we weren't simply performers carrying out someone else's decisions. We participated in the writing, choreography, staging, and development of the work. I helped create Chinoiserie, Elephant Memories, and 4AM America with the company, and that collaborative approach had a lasting influence on the work I would later make myself.

John Kauffmann and According to Coyote

Another important influence was John Kauffman, an actor, playwright, director, and storyteller whose work drew on his Nez Perce heritage. Shortly before his death, John passed his one-man work According to Coyote on to me. It was an extraordinary gift and an honor to have known and worked with him. Performing the piece eventually led me to Minneapolis and to another stage of my life as a theatre artist. It also affected me in a more personal way. John's relationship to his own Indigenous heritage brought me back to questions I had carried about my last name, Oquita, and its tribal origins. Those questions would remain with me for many years.

Minneapolis

Minneapolis became an important home for me as an artist. I performed in many productions at Mixed Blood Theatre, which became a theatrical home for me in the Twin Cities and an important part of my life there.

At the same time, Patrick Scully and Patrick’s Cabaret opened another door. Patrick was an important figure in the Twin Cities arts community, and it was through his vision, encouragement, and the space he created for artists to experiment that I ventured into creating my own work. That encouragement played an important role in the development of the body of work that followed.

My solo works include Glory Hole, The Fuñata, Fireballs, Aftershocked, and High Five. I also wrote Out of the Margins and Echoes from the New World, and co-wrote Nebel and Neblina, Descanso, and Instrumental Journey.

Theatre, Education and Community

Alongside my work as a performer and theatre-maker, education and community work became an increasingly important part of my life. I worked as a teaching artist, educator, facilitator, and program developer with children, young people, and adults in arts, education, health, and community settings. Much of this work grew naturally out of the theatre, but it gradually became a significant part of my work in its own right.

In New York, Making Books Sing (now New York City Children’s Theater) became another professional home for me. I began there as a teaching artist and later became Associate Director of Education, developing and supporting theatre and education programs. At the same time, I continued working as a professional actor, appearing in the company's productions as an Equity performer. I valued being in an organization where performing, teaching, and creating opportunities for young people were not separate parts of my life.

My community work also took me into settings far removed from a conventional theatre. I worked on projects concerned with HIV/AIDS education, diversity, conflict, communication, and community development. Theatre exercises, improvisation, storytelling, and role play gave people ways to approach subjects that were sometimes difficult to talk about directly. The purpose wasn't to train people to become performers. It was to use some of the tools of theatre to help people communicate, listen, participate, and respond to one another.

Over time, I became as interested in the process happening in the room as I was in what might eventually happen on a stage. Working with different communities taught me a great deal about adapting to the people in front of me rather than arriving with a fixed idea of how something should be done. That experience would later become an important part of the way I work as a trainer.

Germany

I came to Germany in 2006, eventually settling in Berlin. After many years of working in theatre, education, and community settings in the United States, the move marked a significant change in both my personal and professional life. I wasn't leaving that earlier work behind, but I was beginning to discover other places where the experience I had accumulated as an actor, director, theatre-maker, and educator could be useful.

Impulsplus

In 2007, I began working with Impulsplus, and over the years it became the center of a new phase of my professional life. I began working increasingly with scientists and researchers at universities, research institutes, graduate schools, and other organizations throughout Germany and internationally. Today, my work includes scientific presentations, funding and job interviews, Q&A, voice and body, storytelling, and communicating complex ideas to different audiences.

The connection to my earlier life in the theatre has remained important. I don't teach researchers to perform or ask them to become actors. Instead, I draw on what I learned through acting, directing, improvisation, collaborative theatre-making, and education. Much of the work happens through practice: trying something, seeing what happens, receiving feedback, making an adjustment, and trying again.

Impulsplus has given me the opportunity to develop this approach over nearly twenty years and with people from an extraordinary range of disciplines and backgrounds. The context is very different from a rehearsal room or a theatre, but many of the questions that interest me are the same: How do you make a complex idea clear? How do you reach the people in front of you? How do you respond when something unexpected happens? And how do you find a way of communicating that feels like your own?

Family History

In recent years, I have returned more seriously to the questions about family history that had surfaced much earlier in my life. My father's family has roots in Sonora, Mexico, and my mother's family in Antioquia, Colombia. The question of the Oquita name and its Indigenous origins eventually took me back to Sonora and into a much deeper investigation of my family's history. On my Colombian side, I have been following another set of family stories and records. What began as curiosity has become an ongoing exploration of where my family came from and how those histories were carried—or sometimes lost—from one generation to the next.

This website brings these different parts of my life together: the theatre work I created and performed, the people and experiences that influenced me, my years in education and community projects, the training and coaching work I do today, and the family histories I am still uncovering.