Biography
Vita Patrick Morales has a BA in Italian Literature from Rutgers University, an MA in Theater and Film from Hunter College and an MS in education from Fordham University. She has written 15 plays some of which have been staged in New York City. In 1988, Her play Francis of Assisi won the Dean’s Prize for the best Masters thesis in the Humanities and the Arts at Hunter College where she was a four-time recipient of the John Golden Award for Playwriting. Her one-act play, All God’s Children, was produced several times in New York City and has won several awards. She was the director of the Alpha and Omega Theater Company’s Children’s Division that produced several of her plays featuring young people from the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood where she lived and taught. She wrote the libretto for the short opera ‘Old Befana’ with the late composer, John Colligan, that was performed twice by the A&O company in Manhattan. For many years she was a member of the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater’s Professional Playwrights Unit. She is currently developing several scripts with the help of the Writers Theater of New Jersey and has been invited to join their Women Playwrights Workshop. She is a reader for the Women Playwrights Competition at the Centenary Stage Company and serves as CSC’s volunteer coordinator. Most recently, her full-length, The Diagonal Trilogy, was awarded a gold medal from the Italian-American Theater Company of Chicago and will be produced as part of their 2019 season. The Trilogy had staged readings by the Centenary Stage Company (2012); Writers Theatre of New Jersey (2017) and was a finalist in the Stage to Screen Competition. Her short play The Wall, was presented at the Jersey City Theater Center as part of the Disruption at the Box festival. She recently completed a play with the Writers Theater of New Jersey about a family caught up in the Cuban revolution entitled The Havana Orthodoxy. This play was one of three finalists in the Centenary Stage Company’s 2018 Women Playwrights Competition and was given a showcase reading on their main stage. It was read again at the Jersey City Theater Center in March 2018 in celebration of Women’s History Month. She is currently working on Vitiligo, a play about a woman with a devastating skin condition that changes her life. Vitiligo had its first staged reading at the 2019 DC Black Theater and Art Festival in Washington, D. C.
Vita is a member of the Dramatist Guild and her profile can be seen on the New Play Exchange
