Khristián Méndez Aguirre

Director, Dramaturg, Playwright, and Producer

Khristián Méndez Aguirre is an award-winning theater artist/scholar, with a practice in directing, dramaturgy, playwriting and producer. He splits his time between NYC and Austin.

Khristián's work is rooted in racial equity and environmental justice, specifically looking at how theater contributes to both. He has trained with and/or been mentored by members from Double Edge Theater, the Rude Mechanicals, and Glass Half Full: Theatre of Objects and Ideas. He received an M.F.A. in Performance as Public Practice from UT Austin, and is an alum of the O’Neill Theater’s National Puppetry Institute and the Candela Fellowship at the Dramatist Guild of America.

He is an emerging leader in the field of Performance and Ecology, having presented his research on ecodramaturgy at World Stage Design, Theatre Communications Group, the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and the American Society for Theatre Research. He has also taught classes on this subject at College of the Atlantic and Princeton University. His writing on eco-dramaturgy can also be found at the Civilians' Extended Play.

Directing credits include a self-produced, large-scale zero-waste production of Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play (featured as an exemplary production in Ground Water Arts Green New Theater), a site-specific production of Manuela Infante's Estado Vegetal / Vegetative State (while an Artist-In-Residence at the Austin Zilker Botanical Garden), and well-acclaimed production of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' Everybody and Alvaro Saar Rios' Luchadora. His worked has been recognized with dozens of nominations and a few awards from the Austin B. Iden Payne, including Best Director of Theater for Youth, and a Special Citation for Sustainable Design and Production. Current writing projects include devising a play about mushrooms and grief with Glass Half Full Theatre in Austin, a new pop-culture-country-musical with his long-term collaborator James W. Parker, and an investigative theater piece about the historic 2024 forest fire season in Guatemala, as part of The Civilians' R&D Group. As a producer, he's raised just over $600,000 through grant-writing.