Artist Profile
Gina Victoria Shaffer, a Cuban American playwright, has written several plays that have been staged in theaters throughout Southern California and off-Broadway. Her play Under the Cuban Moon was presented in a staged reading at Repertorio Español in New York City as a finalist in the MetLife Nuestras Voces National Playwriting Competition. War Spelled Backwards, her one-act play, was published in The Literary Experience, an anthology used in college classrooms. She collaborated with Julian Spencer on an expanded three-act version of the play that was staged at the Electric Lodge in Venice, California. Other works include Dreaming of Barbie, featured in Edward Albee’s Last Frontier Theatre Conference in Alaska; Out of Her Time, selected for a staged reading in the Long Beach Playhouse New Works festival; and If Memory Serves, presented as part of a New Playwrights One-Act Festival at The Producers Theatre in New York. Her short film Cuban Heels was screened at the Inner City Cultural Center Talent Fest at the Ivar Theater in Hollywood. A graduate of the University of California, Irvine, where she received a Ph.D. in English, Gina formerly taught writing at UCLA Writing Programs and is now a professor of English at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo, California. In addition to teaching classes in creative writing and composition, she serves as faculty advisor for WALL Literary Journal, a campus publication that has won national awards. She is affiliated with the Alliance of Los Angeles Playwrights as well as being a member of the Dramatists Guild.