José Teodoro is a writer and director working across forms such as theatre, cinema, music, and literary nonfiction.
His plays include Mote, The Tourist, Slowly, an exchange is taking place, and Cloudless, which was adapted into a streamable serial audio drama presented by Canadian Stage in 2021 and which José is now adapting for the screen. His play Steps was published in the Playwrights Canada Press anthology Long Story Short. The film Binary Star, which José wrote, directed, and co-produced, had its world premiere at the 2023 Cali International Film Festival (FICCALI), where it was presented with live music and voiceover.
Alongside composer-musician Stephen Lyons, José is one half of Applied Silence, a group focused on works that fuse music and narrative. Their first major project is a recording of Screen Door, José’s work for actors and musicians, which was released by Offseason Records online and on vinyl in 2023. Watch the trailer here. You can listen or makes purchases via our Bandcamp page. Applied Silence debuted Screen Door live in December 2021 as part of Pi Theatre’s Provocateur series. Applied Silence created the soundscape for Snezana Pesic’s film Suture, which won Best Experimental Film at the Toronto Independent Film Festival, and are the co-presenters of the aforementioned film Binary Star, for which Stephen composed and performed the music.
José’s works of literary nonfiction includes The Rusted Floor, which appears in Brick 106, Curtains, which was published in subTerrain 90, and Cul-de-sac, which appeared in The Fiddlehead 292. José is co-author, with Mexican artist Laura Barrón, of Cathedral, a bilingual 3.5-metre-long book of text and image, and, with Mexican author Andrés Acosta, of Mérida, a prose exchange published in both dANDelion and as a stand-alone volume from La Mano izquierda Press.
José is also a culture writer, contributing essays, interviews and reviews to publications such as Brick, The Globe & Mail, Film Comment, Quill & Quire, Cinema Scope, Stop Smiling, Long Takes, SubTerrain and The Literary Review of Canada. He has served on juries at over a dozen film festivals throughout Europe and the Americas. He was a juror for the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize for Canadian literature. José has facilitated interdisciplinary thematic workshops, such as Dream Reportage and Object Study for Historic Joy Kogawa House, and Art & Ephemerality, with French vocalist Alexandra Templier, and The Vocal Spectrum for Toronto’s Institute for Creative Exchange. José has also served as story editor on several acclaimed films, including Lina Rodriguez’s This Time Tomorrow and Hugh Gibson’s TFCA Roger’s Best Canadian Film Award-winner The Stairs, and served as co-scenarist and moustache expert in Richard Keating’s A Change of Face.
He is an alumnus of the Canadian Film Centre’s Writer’s Lab, Historic Joy Kogawa House’s writer-in-residence program, and Seattle’s Annex Theatre’s Hothouse. He is a two-time alumnus of Vancouver’s Playwrights Theatre Centre’s WrightSpace and a current PTC Associate. He has been an invited participant in several thematic residencies at the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity, such as the Playwrights Lab, Play-finding with Daniel MacIvor, and the Canada-Mexico Writing-Photography Exchange.
José’s current projects include new play titled Binary Star; a book of literary nonfiction titled Without Destination; a book of conversations with filmmaker Peter Mettler titled Nothing But Time; a screen adaptation of Cloudless; Island, which was developed as part of PTC’s WrightSpace and the 2020 Banff Playwrights Lab; and Sensed Presence, which, as part of a residency with Gachi Prieto Gallery, will be generated from investigations into memory, architecture and ghosts in Buenos Aires. As well, with Applied Silence, and under the auspices of Playwrights Workshop Montréal’s Dramaturgical Collaboration program, José is developing a cycle of narrative songs about labour and migration entitled Finisher.
José has worked as a writer and editor for the Toronto and Panama International Film Festivals, and as a writer, editor and programmer for the Miami International Film Festival. He has made food, delivered food, delivered singing telegrams, delivered urgent documents, delivered people, translated for people, played records for people, constructed shelves, cleaned shelves, and stocked shelves. He once did a fair bit of acting and will surely act more and better. He is a member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada, the Toronto Film Critics Association and FIPRESCI. Available for all manner of public speaking engagements.