KATIE PEÑA-VAN ZILE

My friends call me KVZ.
_{Latina-Lachian (Read: My mother is Mexican. My father is white trash), Queer, Disabled, Army Brat.}

As an artist, I am drawn to crafting narratives about resilience. I write about tenacious women who don’t fit easily into tiny boxes, who know what it’s like to stay silent when all they want to do is scream, women with muddy and unclear areas of their lives that both contradict and confirm all at the same time.

Playwriting has enabled me to have all of the conversations I’ve struggled to initiate as an autistic woman. Playwriting is a way for me to scream at the universe through other people and connect. It feels like having all the conversations I’ve never had at once.

I work every day to fine-tune the timbre of my battle cry and navigate this white male-dominated industry. I’m ready to be heard, and I have a lot to talk about.

When I was 8, 9/11 unfolded before my eyes. I was selectively mute as a child. I excelled in music class, playing the glockenspiel. Hot cross buns. Hot cross—I stopped before the second plane hit, I’m not a monster. The teachers thought we were next. The gold vault, all concrete and false promises, was surely the next target.

When I was 9, my father went to war. I remember watching the invasion of Iraq while playing Phase 10 with my mother and Tia Frances.

When I was 16, I spent the summer studying with the Affrilachian Poets. I unlearned what the Department of Defense had taught me in grade school. I wrote poetry that got me sent to the counselor.

When I was 23 and freshly out of eating disorder treatment, my apartment caught fire and I lost my entire world. I finished my Associate’s degree the next semester, sleeping on an air mattress in the spare bedroom of a kind stripper.

When I was 26, my body collapsed in on itself. Allergic to gravity, there isn’t a moment of the day when the universe isn’t humbling me, pulling my head out of the clouds. Collagen is in everything, they say. I’m genetically too soft, they say. I joke about being a Cancer Rising. No one laughs.

When I was 28, I discovered that my Autism had been missed as a child. I wrote an educational puppet show that teaches children they can say “no” to sexual abuse. Thirty children reported their abusers after performances in the last year, balancing out the deafening silence from my own childhood.

When I was 29, Bachelor’s degree in hand after an eleven-year uphill battle (Seriously, Google Western Kentucky University), with several productions of my children’s play inspired by my rootless and traumatic childhood under my belt, and grant funding to conduct research about elite-level synchronized swimming for my passion project, I began my producing career at Actors Theatre of Louisville and fell in love with helping others bring their voices to the stage.

I find myself marching into my 30’s prepared to take the theatre industry by storm.
I have plenty to say these days.