Ana Maria Simo

Ana Maria Simo is a New York playwright, essayist and novelist. Born in Cuba, educated in France, and writing in English, she has collaborated with such experimental artists as composer Zeena Parkins, choreographer Stephanie Skura and filmmakers Ela Troyano and Abigail Child.

She has also made important contributions as a lesbian activist, co-founding projects such as Medusa's Revenge, the first lesbian theater in New York, the direct action group The Lesbian Avengers, Dyke TV, and The Gully online magazine.

Ana Maria Simo was born in Cienfuegos, Cuba in 1943, and moved to Havana with her grandmother on the eve of the 1959 revolution. She was 15 when she began working as a journalist and 18 when her first book was published: Las fábulas (The Fables), a short story collection. The book was published by Ediciones El Puente, a literary and publishing project (1961 to 1965) which Simo co-directed along with its founder, the poet José Mario Rodríguez.

Simo immigrated first to Paris (Dec. 1967), where she attended Roland Barthes’ seminar and studied sociology and linguistics at the University of Paris VIII-Vincennes (1968-1972). In the mid-1970s she settled in New York, where she began her career as an English-language writer. Her association with playwright/director Maria Irene Fornes’ theater workshop throughout the 1980s was pivotal in her development as a writer.

Some of her most notable works includes her 1990 play "Going to New England" produced at the INTAR theater. The New York Time's Stephen Holden gave the production mixed reviews, but also wrote that the play itself succeeded as "a study in physical and emotional claustrophobia" examining the traditions of Latin American machismo, Roman Catholic values, and erotic taboos.

Simo's "The Bad Play," a 1991 dance-theater collaboration with choreographer Stephanie Skura, also reviewed in The New York Times, was described as "a very broad and very funny parody" of the Hispanic soap opera with philandering doctors and cantankerous mothers-in-law.

Her 1989 short film, How to Kill Her, with Ela Troyano, premiered at the Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival and later went on to win first place in The Latino Film and Video Festival.

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