This Arizona professor has written 120 plays. Guggenheim fellowship will support newest project

Elaine Romero has written 120 plays. And now, the University of Arizona professor is one of more than 200 people named 2026 Guggenheim Fellows by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship this year.

The prestigious fellowship will support the development of her latest play, "Diablos Aquí," which follows a father and daughter born on either side of the U.S.-Mexico border and the way the political reality impacts their lives.

The Show spoke with her more about her work and her reaction to winning the fellowship.

Full conversation

ELAINE ROMERO: I absolutely could not believe it. Even though I know how hard I’ve worked and I know all those plays exist, and I know the community that has supported me here in Arizona and beyond nationally and internationally. And I knew on some level, I think I have the profile of a Guggenheim winner. And now I have a Guggenheim.

LAUREN GILGER: There it is. There it is. And I understand this is something you’ve tried for for a long time, but you did something a little differently this year, maybe a little superstitious to try to get this.

ELAINE ROMERO: Yes, I decided to use my spiritual tradition of writing a note and putting it on my altar at home, that said, "Guggenheim winner." And so when I would walk into my office and walk by my altar, I’d see that little reminder that I intended to win that this year. And voilà, here we are.

LAUREN GILGER: I love that. So let’s back up and talk a little bit about your career and how you got here, right? Like, I read that you’ve called yourself a playwright and a prognosticator, and I wanted to start there and ask, what do you mean by that?

ELAINE ROMERO: What I mean is, I think if an artist is listening and paying attention to the world around them, and considering history, and considering everything that has happened, everything that is happening, and all the potentialities of what might happen, they might find themselves writing things in advance of them occurring, and I was beginning to discover that with my work, that that was happening a lot. And particularly with the rough, rough, rough, rough draft of "Diablos Aquí," already things that I started to write have already occurred.

LAUREN GILGER: That’s crazy. So because you think you’re kind of tapped into the, I guess, the cultural pulse of what may be going on in the world around you, you end up predicting what happens. That’s wild. Give us an example or two.

ELAINE ROMERO: Well, I think it has to do with when we look at history, we can say, "OK, historically this happened and then that happened." I think that it really is paying attention to not just current trends, but the way things have gone historically.

I would say the big one with "Diablos Aquí" was, it’s a story of a father and daughter. She is a lawyer and he is a person who has started to, I won’t say collude, but work with ICE to help them catch undocumented people.

And in my play, in my first, first, first, rough, rough, rough draft, I had him admit to being on an airplane to El Salvador, and that he, when he got there, he was shocked by what he saw, and at that time, we didn’t know anybody would any migrants would be sent to El Salvador to the prison there. We didn’t know that at the time that I wrote that. So I would say to me, that was the loud and I, there isn’t a louder example than that one.

LAUREN GILGER: Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, so what was your reaction when you saw the news on this and realized once again, you know, you’ve sort of predicted reality? And in a way, I’m guessing you’re not incredibly happy about.

ELAINE ROMERO: No. It’s always I want to be wrong. I would rather have the work be insignificant and not matter. Honestly, I don’t want to be right about negative directions for our democracy, or the treatment of human beings that has sunk to such a degree that we don’t recognize ourselves anymore as a country.

LAUREN GILGER: So I know you also work with students as they create and develop new work at the University of Arizona there, right? I wonder, what does the work that they are doing make you think about, maybe the state of the country, but maybe also our collective future?

ELAINE ROMERO: It’s really interesting because I just produced their festival in March, and I asked the students to come up with a theme. The theme was "Broken." And all the plays had to do with some level of brokenness, whether it be psychological, or social, or global. They found their way to that theme, and I thought that was illuminating because it told me that they’re not having, you know, they’re not writing the pizza dorm play right now.

LAUREN GILGER: That’s not what’s happening. What kind of play is that, the pizza dorm play?

ELAINE ROMERO: It’s a very common play you get as a playwrighting professor if the students are not paying attention to the world, but these students are.

LAUREN GILGER: I mean, does that also at the same time as it might be a sign of the times that the theme they chose was broken, but also, I mean does it give you some hope?

ELAINE ROMERO: Gives me hope that they’re willing to be deep and that they understand that they can be both comic and deep, and that those two things are not mutually exclusive. We even had a student write a song in two languages, and we did auditions and people showed up and in the piece, there were people singing in two languages.

So I think that there is the students give me great hope in their ability to access themselves. I feel like that is the gift I receive from my teachers, is how do I access myself and not censor myself as I go, and I really endeavor to teach the students at the University of Arizona that same access because I really think that if you can find that direct access without funneling through your judgment of yourself, or oh, the importance of this piece that I’m creating, or any of that, then you can get to something that’s really true. And the characters will feel really true.

And even with this wonderful gift of the Guggenheim, I am now reminding myself, it’s still me and the page, it’s still the simple act of creating a play from nothing, and still approaching it with beginner’s mind, as if I’ve never done it before. I want every play to have its own structure, and to demand its own frame, and this play will have to do the same. It doesn’t get any special treatment. It has to go through the same exact process.

LAUREN GILGER: I guess that’s fair enough. So, I mean, let me ask you, I mean, 120 plays or so you’ve written, I read, which is a whole lot, quite a collection, and I wonder over the course of doing that and in still doing it today, and working with students on this, and being so embedded in the theater, what do you think the power of the theater is?

It sounds like your work and the way you think about theater is very much integrated into, you know, the state of the world. It’s not like this separate, higher art.

ELAINE ROMERO: I think it’s there to tell us we’re human, to help us understand we’re human, and to help us know it’s OK we’re human. And I think the only way out of any kind of political quagmire is the truth of humanity. And we have to come back to that.

LAUREN GILGER: All right, we’ll leave it there. Elaine Romero, a playwright, UA professor, festival director of the New Directions Festival at the University of Arizona, and a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow. Elaine, thank you so much for joining me to talk about this. Congratulations.

ELAINE ROMERO: Thank you, Lauren. Thank you for having me.