The creative process of Barroga, author of Buffalo’ed, Walls, Banyan, Aurora and numerous other dramatic works, is captured through correspondence, journals and production binders in the archive. 

Born in Milwaukee, Jeannie Barroga headed west to northern California after college where her career as a playwright took shape. Barroga often draws upon her Filipino background in her writings, which have influenced the American theater landscape. She is also the most produced Filipina-American playwright having plays performed across the globe. 

“The rich archive will be of great interest to students and scholars of Asian diasporic and American theater,” said Rebecca Wingfield, the curator at Stanford Libraries who will maintain Barroga’s archive. 

Locally, Barroga has worked as a playwright, producer, director, dramaturge and literary manager at both the Oakland Ensemble Theater and Palo Alto’s TheatreWorks, as well as artistic director at both the Asian American Theater Company and Teatro ng Tanan, both in San Francisco.

According to Robert Kelley, TheatreWorks Artistic Director, “Barroga is not only one of the country’s leading Filipina-American playwrights, she is a prototype of a new American playwright as well, writing from the hub of a hundred cultural intersections on a troubled landscape.”

Barroga has received numerous awards over the thirty-five years of playwriting, including the Wallace Alexander Gerbode and William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Playwright Collaboration Award with Kularts Artistic Director, Alleluia Panis for Buffalo’ed at San Jose Stage Company; the National Endowment for the Arts Access to Artistic Excellence for Walls at the Asian American Theater Company; Best Original Production in Solano at Mira Theatre Vallejo; and the East Bay Fund for Artists for Mattie Mae through the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts.

The contents of the Jeannie Barroga Archive include the full output of her creative work, including multiple drafts of her plays, production binders and journals, audiovisual materials, personal writings, and correspondence. Once processed, the archive will be available to researchers in the Department of Special Collections in Green Library.

About Jeannie Barroga

Jeannie Barroga is a nationally-produced playwright, teacher, director and local video producer. She has written 62 plays and her work has been published, anthologized, and produced nationally and internationally.

In addition to the awards previously listed, she received nominations for the CalArts Herb Alpert Award and the Flournoy Playwright Award. She has had theatre presentations at the Pan Asian Theater New York; the Mark Taper Forum and East West Players, Los Angeles; Kumu Kahua Theater, Honolulu; Northwest Asian American Theater, Seattle; and institutions such as the University of California-Berkeley; New World Theater University of Massachusetts-Amherst; GenSeng SUNY; Baltimore College, and others.

Jeannie Barroga’s work has been included in the anthologies Unbroken Thread and in Asian American Women in Drama. For more information on Barroga's current work, see her personal website. 

For further information, about the Jeannie Barroga Archive, please contact: