Biography

Marc David Pinate is a theatre maker, performer, and educator. His directorial aesthetic merges performance and the sacred to create liminal spaces where experiments with form and physicality engender affective moments of beauty and healing.

Marc has worked nationally with the likes of Teatro Visión, Shadowlight Productions, Su Teatro, Campo Santo, the Magic Theatre, El Teatro Campesino, Steppenwolf, and Cleveland Public to name a few. The recipient of a Doris Duke funded three-year residency at La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley, California, he founded the Hybrid Performance Experiment (The HyPE) known for guerrilla theatre performances on Bay Area Rapid Transit trains. Marc was a member of the spoken word troupe, Chicano Messengers of Spoken Word which received a National Performance Network commission to co-author Fear of a Brown Planet. A National Slam Poetry Champion he fronted the band, Grito Serpentino, a spoken word and music ensemble. Marc was a program director at Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana/MACLA, a Latinx arts center in San José, California; and at the historic, Galería de la Raza, in San Francisco.

The producing artistic director of Tucson's Borderlands Theater since 2013, he has led nationally acclaimed placemaking projects focused on border narratives - Their Dogs Came With Them (2019), Sanctuary (2018), Sonoran Shadows (2016) - in non-traditional settings while collaborating with an array of institutional partners, artists, and communities. His most recent directing credits include the rolling world premiere of Building the Wall by Robert Schenkkan, and Barrio Stories, a large scale heritage festival and outdoor spectacle of popular theatre, live music, digital projections and audience interaction. Marc holds an MFA from the Theatre School at DePaul University and also teaches theater at Pima Community College, in Tucson.