Tanya Saracho

Tanya Selene Saracho is a Mexican-American actress, playwright, dramaturge and screenwriter. With a background in theater before writing for television, she co-founded in 2000 and was its co-artistic director for ten years. She also co-founded the Alliance of Latinx Theater Artists (ALTA) of Chicago. Her work centers Latina perspectives and characters. She developed and was showrunner of the Starz series , which ran for three seasons (2018–2020). Saracho signed a three-year development deal with Starz in February 2018.

Early life Tanya Selene Saracho was born in , Mexico, to Ramiro A. Saracho, head customs officer with the where she and her mother chose to reside together with her two younger sisters Tatiana Saracho and Fresy Saracho.

Career Theater Saracho moved to Chicago in 1998 and began working as an actress, but found her opportunities largely confined to typecast roles as maids or sex workers. In June 2000 she co-founded the theater company with Coya Paz; its original ensemble was made up of ten Latina performers. drawn from interviews with fifty men across the U.S. and performed by the all-Latina cast in drag; it won two non-Equity Jeff Awards.

Saracho parted with the group in January 2010 to focus on playwriting. a service organization for Latinx-identified theater artists in the city.

Multiple plays that she worked on in this time received nominations for the Jeff Award.

One of her first works after leaving was for the Goodman Theatre, co-produced with , as a reconstruction of Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard set in the pecan orchards of Northern Mexico amid the drug wars, which ran at the Goodman Theatre from March 26 to April 24, 2011. At that time, she was resident playwright at Chicago Dramatists, resident playwright at , a Goodman Theatre Fellow at the Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media at Columbia College Chicago and an artistic associate with Chicago's LGBTQ-oriented About Face Theatre. She was also then working on two Andrew W. Mellon Foundation commissions for Steppenwolf Theatre, an adaptation of a play for Oregon Shakespeare Festival called The Tenth Muse, and a historical fiction piece for About Face Theatre called The Good Private. The latter, about a transgender soldier in the American Civil War, was inspired by the story of Albert Cashier, assigned female at birth in Ireland but who lived out his life in Illinois as a man after fighting for the Union Army.

Her 2014 work also included Mala Hierba at the Second Stage Uptown and Hushabye as part of Steppenwolf's First Look in 2014. She founded the Ñ Project and is a member of The Kilroys' List, SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild of America West; she has also worked as a voice-over actress.

Television In 2012, Saracho began working in television, benefiting from the ABC Diversity program. In 2014, Saracho wrote a two-hander for the Goodman Theatre in which one character was a first-year TV writer and the other a janitor.

After Devious Maids, Saracho wrote for HBO's Girls and Looking (in 2013–14), Between seasons of Looking, Saracho worked on The Tenth Muse, an all-female play set in a convent in Colonial Mexico. created, co-wrote, and co-produced the show Vida. She assembled an all-Latinx, "heavily queer" writers' room She has described season 1 of Vida as a three-hour pilot.

She is also developing another series with Big Beach called , based on her 2007 play , which will follow four Afro-Caribbean / Latinx Chicagoans within the counter-culture. and a National Endowment for the Arts Distinguished New Play Development Project Grant with About Face Theater. In January 2019, she was presented with the 2019 Final Draft New Voice Award for Television and won the 2019 GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Comedy Series for .

In June 2020, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the first LGBTQ Pride parade, Queerty named her among the fifty heroes “leading the nation toward equality, acceptance, and dignity for all people”.

Personal life Saracho identifies as queer. She was diagnosed with diabetes in 2010, of which there is a family history. ("Let Me Tell You", 2001) (2011, 1 male, 4 female) ("Weed", 2014, 4 female) Hushabye (2014, 3 male, 2 female) Fade (2016, 1 male, 1 female)

Television Year Title Role(s) Notes 2013 Devious Maids Staff writer Episode 1x07: "Taking a Message" Episode 1x09: "Scrambling the Eggs" 2014–2015 Looking Story editor Episode 1x04: "Looking for $220/Hour" Episode 1x06: "Looking in the Mirror" Episode 1x08: "Looking Glass" Episode 2x05: "Looking for Truth" Episode 2x08: "Hi, I'm Philip" Episode 2x12: "It's a Trap" 2018–2020 Vida Creator, executive producer and showrunner All 3 seasons and 22 episodes Writer Episode 1x01: "Episode 1" Episode 1x02: "Episode 2" Episode 1x06: "Episode 6" Episode 2x01: "Episode 7" Episode 2x09: "Episode 15" Episode 2x10: "Episode 16" Episode 3x01: "Episode 17" Episode 3x06: "Episode 22" Director Episode 2x10: "Episode 16" Episode 3x04: "Episode 20" Episode 3x05: "Episode 21" Episode 3x06: "Episode 22"