Cuban Theater Digital Archive

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Born in Puerto Rico and raised in Miami, Teo Castellanos is an actor/writer/director who works in theater, film and television. Teo received his BFA in Theatre from Florida Atlantic University under a full scholarship where he studied with four time Tony Award winner Zoe Caldwell. He is author of War, Revolution, and the Projects, a one man trilogy, which he has toured on the East coast, as well as his one-man show NE 2nd Avenue, based on Miami characters, which was commissioned and produced by Miami Light Project as part of their 2001-2002 Contemporary Performance Series and went on to be produced by Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami in an enormously successful 10-week run. You can also catch him on the silver screen in John Leguizamo’s Empire. Teo Castellano’s NE 2nd Avenue was awarded the International Cultural Exchange grant by Miami-Dad County Cultural Affairs, which allowed Teo to bring his work to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival where it won the Fringe First Award, the most prestigious theater award of the festival. It was also nominated for a South Florida Carbonell Ward for Best New Work and was awarded Best Solo Performance by Miami new Time and Best Original Play by Miami Beach Sun and is currently touring nationally and internationally. Teo is the recipient of the State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship 2005. He is a member of the men of color theater collective, The Hittite Empire, based in Los Angeles, with which he has toured in the U.S. and London, England. He also toured Cuba as part of the Parece Blanca cast, a theater production that brought Cuban exiles to work with artists living on the island for the first time in history, in order to form a unified cast. While in Cuba, Teo performed excerpts of NE 2nd Avenue at the renowned theater commune Teatro Escambray. He was curator of the solo performance stage for George Sanchez Calderon’s Miami Mid Town Mid-Way installation for Art Basel 2003. Teo is the founder and Artistic Director of D-Projects, an urban arts collective whose original theater work examines and dissects social ills through performance. Teo has taught theater workshops throughout the state of Florida as well as in Arizona, Georgia, Illinois, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. For five years, he directed a theater company of African American and Latino youth/young adults that toured original work to jails, detention centers, residential substance abuse treatment programs and community centers carrying a message focused on HIV prevention. Mr. Castellanos has served on several grants/awards panels including: Theatre Professionals, Individual Artist Interdisciplinary Fellowship, Emmy for Latin American Children’s Programming, Here and Now and New Forms Miami. Teo is a member of Screen Actors Guild, The Dramatists Guild of America and is represented in Europe by Universal Arts.