My name is Viviana Prado-Núñez and I am a Columbia College senior majoring in Drama and Theatre Arts. Storytelling is how humans learn about themselves. We share our stories in the hopes that we are not alone and that other people will hear them and also feel not alone. We also need stories in order to learn, and also to feel connected to one another. To that end, I also feel like creativity is the most simultaneously human, satisfying, frustrating, and necessary things there is--and that also creativity is just another way to learn.

I'm mostly hoping to get my hands on some good stories/people/interviews, and to learn about genres I may not know much about. I'd also like experience around interviewing and generating content for a podcast, since I've been interested in that for a while, but haven't found a way in as of yet.

I am participating in The Creative Process mostly to get a hang of interviewing people since I think it could be useful for future creative work. I am also interested in further engaging in the practice interviewing as an act of mutual engagement, learning, and listening--something I view to be very much related to my theatrical practice (I am also an actor), as well as the simple act of being present and interested in others' stories. I am also constantly interested in art other people are making in the city, and would love to learn more.

I recently had a staged reading in L.A. of a play I wrote for the National Young Playwrights in Residence Program called Medusa, Underwater. I am currently in the interview process for a potential reading/production of my Hurricane Maria play, And the Trees Fall Down, with Corkscrew Theatre Festival. I am pretty sure my next big project will be a second novel. I think it might verge into autofiction (maybe). I think it might be called We Learned It From Our Mothers.

I am flirting with the idea of doing an immersive theatre/film/dance piece in the Movement Lab at Barnard College--which is a high-tech dance lab with projections on all the walls and the floor and a lot of movement tech. I am currently a semifinalist for the Fulbright in Nepal, where I hope to teach children theatre as an extracurricular activity.

General future plans: Graduate. Find an additional part-time job in addition to the one I already have in NYC. Work on my writing. Try and get my Maria play up as soon as I can. Go to Nepal from March 2021-December 2021 (if I get the Fulbright). And then get my MFA in something writing/theatre-related.

Past interviewing projects include a semester abroad with SIT's journalism program in Morocco, for which I conducted a five-week independent research project on Venezuelan migrant-musicians in Morocco both in French and Spanish in order to produce an original feature story. On behalf of Columbia's student-run WKCR, I also recently interviewed a sustainability-focused nonprofit based in Puerto Rico called Tabonuco working to bring solar panel systems to communities affected by the recent earthquakes in the southwestern parts of the island.

In terms of Columbia's on-campus publications I have been involved with, I am a former staff editor for Quarto Magazine and have published personal essays in Columbia Spectator--in the city, I am currently a script-reader for The Playwrights Realm. I am also a published author, poet, essayist, and playwright currently longlisted for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award. Most of my creative work and my writer bio can be found on my website: www.vivianapradonunez.com