Alejandra Rivera Flaviá

Alejandra Rivera Flaviá is a Caribbean actress and writer graduated from Brown University with a B.A. in Theatre Arts and a solid foundation in Psychology and Anthropology.Originally from the Dominican Republic, in the days when her head hardly made it to her mother's waist, Alejandra roamed around the streets of Santo Domingo daydreaming about becoming an actor. Little did she know those imaginings were only a single dimension of what she would eventually want to do.At the age of eight, moving to Puerto Rico unconsciously strengthened in her an identity that she had carried since she was born (on that one year her parents lived in the outskirts of Massachusetts): that of an immigrant. Through the spurts and fits of adolescence in a place different from her family's home, she first delved into theatre at fourteen, when she walked into the audition room of her high school's Forensics Team, a drama club that participated in the island-wide English Forensics League of Puerto Rico's annual monologue competition. The training and support she received from teachers and students in the team not only encouraged her to eventually become the Captain, but also made fact out of a long-dreamt idea: She wanted to be an actor. In 2009, she graduated from Baldwin School of Puerto Rico having won First Place in the Serious Dramatic Category of the anxiously awaited contest. For years to come, she would remember one of her best friends carrying her to the stage on piggy-back to pick up her award as one of the happiest moments of her life.She went on to attend Brown University, the college that would shake lessons into her in more ways than one. Aside from being fortunate enough to act in various productions on the main stage and off (such as Talk, A Perfect Wedding, the touring Yermedea Raw, and Medea) and being under the mentorship of genius minds such as Lowry Marshall, Erik Ehn, Thom Jones, Patricia Ybarra, John Emigh, and Kym Moore, Alejandra was a member of various organizations, most notably Sock & Buskin, the official student/faculty theatre production board that decided and ran the Theatre Department's annual season. It was on this board, discussing plays' social relevance and fighting for equal representation of different bodies on the stage, coupled with internalizing arguments in Brown's classrooms and whispers by revolutionarily brilliant millennials in the sometimes sun-lit Providence streets, that she learned about the importance of intellectual, analytical expression through art and its power and influence over society.That was when acting, as a dream, began to hold the hand of another: Telling her own stories.Thus, as the culmination of her work at Brown, Alejandra wrote, produced, and performed an hour-long semi-comedic solo show titled The Windows Are Also Helping, which tells the story of a Latin immigrant girl's journey through childhood and adolescence framed by the unfortunately difficult process of developing the courage and self-confidence to finally realize that one, especially as a socially oppressed individual, has actually always been so much more than worthy of another's love. In May of 2014, she graduated from Brown University with the honor of being chosen as the distinguished actor to receive the Weston Fine Arts Award for Excellence in Acting. This time, there was no piggy-back ride, but instead a humbling, unforgettable introduction of her life and work by her beloved mentor Lowry Marshall.Right after college, she joined production company BlueFace Design as the lead in her first feature-length film, The Waterfall, a horror/thriller written, produced, and directed by Airelle Adam. As soon as filming resumed, she moved to the Big Apple, where she won a prestigious Monologue Challenge competition that landed her solid representation, marking the beginning of her professional career in New York City. Aside from acting, she continues to write and perform as a means of sharing stories she deems important to the development of a just social and political system. Show less «