Meet the Ensemble
Marc David Pinate
Producing Artistic Director
(520) 276-9598
marc@borderlandstheater.org
Marc David Pinate has worked with noteworthy theaters across the country including Magic Theatre, Campo Santo, El Teatro Campesino, ShadowLight Productions, Steppenwolf, and Victory Gardens. He was the recipient of a Doris Duke three-year residency at La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley, California where he founded the Hybrid Performance Experiment known for their site specific theatre performances. Marc was a member of the spoken word troupe, Chicano Messengers of Spoken Word for which received a National Performance Network commission in to co-author Fear of a Brown Planet. He taught acting at San Jose State University’s department of Television, Radio, Film and Theatre for eight years. In June 2013, he completed an MFA in Directing from The Theatre School at DePaul University in Chicago. Pinate is the Producing Artistic Director of Borderlands Theater where he conceived and directed Mas, a docu-theater project about the banning of ethnic studies in Arizona incorporating indigenous ceremony; and the Barrio Stories projects – a series of large scale, site specific creative placemaking spectacles bringing professional artists in collaboration with community members and cross-sector partners to preserve the character and heritage of Tucson’s historic Mexican American neighborhoods. In 2019 he received a $50,000 NEA Our Town Grant to begin work on Barrio Stories Nogales at the US-Mexico border. From 2018-2019 was part of the Arizona Creative Communities inaugural cohort, a one year program, sponsored by Arizona State University’s Herberger Institue of Art and Design and the Arizona Commission on the Arts designed to develop placemaking and civic practice projects throughout the state of Arizona. His innovative efforts have been featured in American Theatre magazine, HowlRound, Arizona Daily Star, and Remezcla to name a few. Pinate has taught theater at Pima Community College in Tucson and guest directed at the University of Arizona School of Theater.
Milta Ortiz
Associate Artistic Director
milta@borderlandstheater.org
Milta Ortiz is a Salvadoran American playwright in Tucson. She’s originally from the Bay Area by way of El Salvador. A concert sharing of Anita, a musical in collaboration with composer Quetzal Guerrero was part of the One Nation One project on July 27, 2024. She’s excited to premiere Anita at Borderlands in the 2025/26 season. Anita was developed at Borderlands Theater. Prior development partners include the University of Arizona Theater Department, and Childsplay at Phoenix College. She devised Antigona 3.0 with Borderlands Theater ensemble, which premiered in Spring 2024 and will tour in Fall 2024. She directed The Candy Craze: A Sticky Situation at Pima Community College in October 2023, a play she facilitated Pima students in writing, the second installment of a TYA ongoing project. In Fall 2022, she directed Ballet & Bagels, a TYA play she facilitated her students in writing at Pima Community College in Spring 2021. Milta was a 2020-21 Projecting All Voices Mellon fellow at Arizona State University HIDA. Her play, Pilar and Paloma was at Launchpad’s 2021 Bipoc Reading Series Festival. Judge Torres, commissioned and produced by Milagro Theatre Group, toured nationally to universities (2019-2020). Milta is Associate Artistic Director at Borderlands Theater, where a few of her plays, including Sanctuary (2018) and Más (2015) have world premiered. Borderlands’ production of Más toured Arizona universities. Más was produced at Su Teatro, Ubuntu Theatre Project/Laney College, and San Diego State University. She earned an MFA from Northwestern University. She is proud to serve on the National New Play Network board of directors.
Adam Cooper-Terán
Media Designer / Technical Director
adam@borderlandstheater.org
Adam Cooper-Terán (ACT) is a native of Tucson, Arizona, born from a mixed heritage of Mexican, Yaqui, and Jewish roots. Known for their collaborations among various performance troupes, theater companies, musicians, and dancers, Adam’s work has featured across the globe as large-scale media projections, musical interventions, and installations of digital storytelling.
Adam’s work as a DIY performer, producer, and designer has led to residencies at Project Row Houses in Houston, Latino/Chicanx arts organization MACLA in San Jose, Teatro Tespys in El Carmen de Viboral, Colombia, Universidad Cd. Juárez, and the University of Rostock, Germany. Adam has garnered praise and support from academic and cultural institutions such as the MAP Fund, National Endowment for the Arts, National Performers Network, Network for Ensemble Theaters, Arizona State University, Belle Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, National Hispanic Cultural Center, and the International Sonoran Desert Alliance. Current projects involve the disruption of mainstream media, however possible, while continuing to support and augment underrepresented voices across the spectrum.
Jonathan Heras
Teaching Artist
jon@borderlandstheater.org
Jonathan is an actor and singer from Yuma, Arizona and now a Tucson performing artist and member of the Borderlands Theater Ensemble. He has worked with various local theaters including Live Theatre Workshop, Stories That Soar, Gaslight Theater, and many more. He develops and writes content with a group of artists called Digital Desmadre to create content and raise awareness through social media platforms. He has worked with youth as a theater teaching artist for over 10 years and is currently the musical director at Sal Pointe Catholic High School.
Gregory James Houston
Lighting Designer
gregoryjameshouston@gmail.com
Gregory James Houston is all about lights and vibes! He’s been freelancing as a lighting designer, especially rocking it out with Borderlands on tons of shows. He’s a proud graduate of the University of Arizona, where he nerded out on technical theater production with a major in lighting design. Gregory swapped cacti for palm trees, moving from Tucson to Los Angeles, where he’s now the go-to Lighting Designer at Avalon Hollywood. Plus, he’s still jamming with XIXA, a cool band from Tucson.
Katharine Len Yee Mitchell
Production Manager
katharine@borderlandstheater.org
As a biracial explorer of this world, with roots in the US and Malaysia, Katharine centers her work on individual and community stories and the connection to place and others, accessibility, community development as freedom, and healing. Katharine has lived in the Sonoran Desert in Tucson, Arizona since 2011. She completed her Masters in Urban Planning at the University of Arizona and Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Anthropology at Bard College in New York. With two decades of experience working with for profit and nonprofit organizations in Southeast Asia, California, New York, District of Columbia, Virginia and Arizona, Katharine leads with generosity, abundance and a curious mind. Her strengths are in community organizing, outreach and stakeholder engagement, research, policy, project management, grant writing, program evaluation, and healing as mentor. She is a big picture thinker who easily adapts to new environments. She is continuously inspired by solutions that help the most vulnerable in our communities and in final products that are beautiful in every sense contributing to local culture. Katharine currently works in community as a consultant/contractor and volunteers her time in mutual aid growing in her knowledge and network in Tucson and beyond.
Anita Chavarin
Social Media Manager
anita@borderlandstheater.org
Anita Chavarin joins WFSA with a background in social media management and digital marketing. Anita began her marketing career working for Hydrant, a Tucson-based Marketing Agency. Since then, she has worked as a freelance creative as well as for-profit businesses. She has more than three years of experience in developing multi-channel content strategies, copywriting, and digital analytics. As a first-generation college graduate, she obtained her Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Studies from the University of Arizona. She is passionate about creating educational content that promotes awareness for social and environmental matters.
Our Founder
Barclay Goldsmith
Barclay Goldsmith is the founder of Borderlands Theater (1986) which in turn developed out of a community-based theater collective: Teatro Libertad, a collective active in the 1970’s civil rights movement. Before, Goldsmith lived and worked in Mexico and Argentina, where he directed U.S.-Host Country Bi-National Cultural Centers. He has spent the better part of his theater life, in addition to teaching, developing and producing theater that speaks to the diverse voices of the region. Through the Border Playwrights Program (1988), he has sought to have emerging (and established) playwrights produced here and in theaters around the country. In support of this mission, Goldsmith was a co-founder of the National New Play Network (1998), an organization which now encompasses over 90 member theaters, that champions the new plays and new playwrights. Expanding Borderlands’ mission to be truly a theater of PLACE here on the border, he established the U.S. Mexico Program, which works extensively with Mexican artists and theater companies in trans-national projects.
He has directed many of Borderlands Theater’s productions. Ongoing programs he has established include the Border Playwrights Project, featuring new plays by established and emerging playwrights, and The U.S./Mexico Project supporting exchanges of theater practitioners across the border. He is a founding member of the National New Play Network and has worked as director at Circulo Teatral in Mexico City, in new play development and translations at LARK Play Development Center in New York, and at the Kennedy Center’s National MFA program in Washington, D.C. He is a graduate of Stanford University, BA, and Carnegie Mellon University, MFA.