I’m William Ruiz Morales, a dramaturg, producer, and program designer. I work with artists and cultural organizations to develop new work, design impactful programs, and build the structures that sustain them. Based in Los Angeles.
CURRENT PROJECTS
Flight Ways / The Color Question:
I am producing and directing a short documentary tracing a century of migration, silence, and ideological rupture through one Cuban family, and the republication of Bernardo Ruiz Suárez’s 1922 book The Color Question in the Two Americas, returned to Spanish for the first time.
LiveARC: Los Angeles
I am currently producing two free full-day gatherings on May 30 and 31, for artists to connect, learn, and build sustainable practices. Produced in partnership with the City of Santa Monica Cultural Affairs and the Artist Resource Collective.
PRODUCTION – DRAMATURGY
I collaborate with musicians and performers such as Nina Fukuoka in Story of O (2025) and Restless (2022), and as a dramaturg with San Cha’s Inebria Me (2025) and Anoche by Alexandro Segade (2024). In these collaborations, I support the artist’s voice while shaping a dramaturgical conversation that helps the work grow and settle into its best form.
Experimental opera adapting her album La Luz de la Esperanza. A woman’s journey through captivity to transcendence, moving between religious iconography and telenovela melodrama.
Co-commissioned by PSNY, PICA, MACLA, and REDCAT.
FESTIVALS – PROGRAM DESIGN
Living Away · New York & Miami, 2017–2022
Director & Curator
A live arts initiative rooted in immigrant experiences, presenting artist-led work and cross-city exchange across New York and Miami. Editions included a Brooklyn festival at 17 Frost Gallery and a pandemic-era online program bringing together artists from across the world to imagine work for a time of isolation. Living Away treated the festival not as a showcase but as a site of gathering, where diasporic and experimental practices could enter into dialogue, and where distance itself became a creative condition.
Espacios Ibsen · Havana, 2013–2017
Creative Producer & Lead Curator
A Cuban–Norwegian theatre platform and festival dedicated to fostering experimental voices and international exchange in live arts. For five consecutive years, Espacios Ibsen activated multiple Havana venues with performances, exhibitions, labs, and public dialogues, offering a rare independent space for artistic and political experimentation on the island. The festival ran alongside the Laboratorio Ibsen, a research-driven platform for open showings and socio-aesthetic investigation. Partners included the Embassy of Norway in Cuba, the Consejo Nacional de las Artes Escénicas, Centro Cultural Bertolt Brecht, and Fundación Ludwig de Cuba.
ART PROJECTS
My artistic work has been shifting over the years. I began as a theater director, staging full productions in Havana from 2007, and gradually moved toward dramaturgy and embodied performance practices that are quieter, more distilled, and more attentive to the present moment.
The ongoing series Lectures by The Idiot is an exploration of hybrid performance-lectures that weave movement, philosophy, and installation. The Idiot is a figure I return to often, someone who thinks out loud, gets lost, and invites the audience into that wandering as a shared experiment. The series had recent presentations in Berlin in 2024 with On Work, and I am currently developing a new iteration with On Self for 2026.
Before that, Derrotero (2023) and the series Bojeo (2016–2020) mapped my interest in geography, diaspora, and ruins, using movement and language to trace what remains after histories of displacement and survival. These works explore how Caribbean and immigrant experiences inform the ways we move through, adapt, and make meaning within the places we inhabit.
Earlier in my work, I directed theater in Havana, where I staged more than twenty pieces, including Idomeneo (2013), Woyzeck (2012), and Suvenir (2012). Those years taught me resourcefulness and collective problem-solving, skills that continue to anchor my work today, even as my practice has shifted into more minimal, social, and experimental forms.
NEWS
NET Create + Activate: Cohort 2. Joined the Network of Ensemble Theaters’ yearlong artistic-exchange circle for BIPOC ensemble artists, gathering monthly to share practice, support one another, and imagine new forms of collaboration.
IETM Global Connect 2026. Joining performing arts leaders from around the world in online sessions, a new podcast series, and the 2026 IETM Plenary Meeting in Oulu, Finland.
