matthew paul olmos was born and raised in Los Angeles to a police officer and Labor/Delivery nurse. He moved to New York in August 2001 to pursue playwriting.
He is the inaugural recipient of La MaMa ETC's Emerging Artist Award, as selected by Sam Shepard, a Sundance Institute Time Warner Storytelling Fellow, two-time Resident Artist at Mabou Mines/Suite, Ensemble Studio Theater lifetime member, Brooklyn Arts Exchange Resident Artist, and was recently awarded the “Top prize for the Americas” by the BBC 2011 International Playwriting Competition for his play The Nature of Captivity. Recent finalist for InterAct Theatre’s 20/20 Commission; semi-finalist for Princess Grace, P73 Fellowship, O’Neill Conference, alternate Van Lier recipient at New Dramatists, and was a Playwrights of New York (PONY) nominee.
Co-founder and former Artistic Director of woken’glacier theatre company (two-time New York Innovative Theatre Award nominee), a member of No Passport with Caridad Svich, a National Endowment for the Arts New Play Development reader, a New York Innovative Awards judge, and a Final Selection Committee member for Playwrights’ Week as well a core staff member at the Lark Play Development Center.
H;)
e holds an M.F.A. in Playwriting from The Actor’s Studio Drama School, a B.A. in Playwriting from UC Santa Barbara, and was given UCLA’s GOP Award for Graduate Playwriting.
He is a regular contributor to The Brooklyn Rail's In Dialogue series, where he has had essays published on work Tommy Smith, Saviana Stanescu, Kristoffer Diaz, and Carla Ching. He is a writer for New York Theatre Review, where he has written several pieces on Belarus Free Theatre, Under the Radar; as well is a regular reviewer. He is also soon-to-be-published in the annual New York Theatre Review book on downtown theater with his essay entitled “The Feeding Process of Mabou Mines.”
His play i put the fear of mexico in’em been developed and/or presented by Sundance Theatre Institute, Intar Theatre, The Working Theatre, LaMicro, Lark Play Development Center, The Kennedy Center with The Inkwell, and the Gala Theatre in DC. It was also on the syllabus at a Rutger’s University undergraduate course taught by Caridad Svich.
In April 2012, his absurdist comedy Monkey will be presented at Brooklyn Arts Exchange under the direction of Morgan Gould, Associate Artistic Director of Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company. Also in April, his play the death of the slow'dying scuba diver will be presented as part of terraNOVA Collective's Groundbreaker Playwright Reading series.
He is currently working on several new works including: a new work entitled the drinking of an unhappy people; a still untitled piece based on the behavior of cancer cells; and a trilogy entitled so go the ghosts of méxico, which focuses on the U.S./México drug wars.
He will world-premiere a new work at La MaMa ETC in 2012-13.
He currently lives in Brooklyn, recently became a PADI certified scuba diver, and is currently learning (slowly, and with great difficulty) to surf.