Cartoon-style Bitmoji avatar that looks like Alejandra, smiling and waving while sitting in a manual wheelchair, with short dark hair and glasses, wearing a long sleeved blue top, black pants and sneakers.

Alejandra Ospina

is a first-generation native New Yorker with roots in Colombia. She has been active for many years in advocacy and performance projects locally and beyond. In her youth, she was a founding member of the Fearless Theater Company in NYC, performing with Itzhak Perlman at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall in Claire’s Broom Detective Agency: The Mystery of the Missing Violin.

In recent years, she has had the opportunity to re-engage with the stage, including as a member of the inaugural cohort of the Theatre for All intensive program for emerging actors with disabilities at the Queens Theatre (2018).  She has since performed in several projects via Queens Theatre (including a summer 2020 staging of Emily Driver’s Great Race Through Time and Space!), as well as through its partnership with the Phamaly Theatre Company in Colorado.

 She has previously trained and performed in physically integrated dance work (Infinity Dance Theater, Heidi Latsky Dance, ZCO Dance Project).

She sings regularly with the Peace of Heart Choir, and sometimes with other folks, too.

She works regularly as a media access provider on a variety of projects, for which she might create content as an audio describer, translator, or closed caption provider.

Alejandra is the Program Coordinator for Dark Room Ballet with Krishna Washburn, an ongoing educational program that prioritizes the needs of blind and visually impaired dance students at introductory and advanced levels.

She is also pursuing narration and voiceover projects, and can be heard as the primary narrator for the audiobook version of Disability Visibility: First Person Stories from the 21st Century (Edited by Alice Wong, Vintage Books, 2020).

Places you might find me: 

Facebook, Twitter (public),  LinkedIn (CV of sorts is there), Flickr, Tumblr (sometimes). I have also loved and lived in Second Life.

Something worth sharing:

Amid the pandemic, people with disabilities reportedly have faced significant job losses. They already experienced stigma, bias and discrimination beforehand but the pandemic only diminished opportunities. At Queens Theatre, which already had been training Deaf and disabled theater professionals, the need to provide support is greater than ever. Now as cultural institutions begin to open up – and with Broadway and Off-Broadway reopenings on the horizon – Queens Theatre is hosting two weeks of workshops to build skills, knowledge and confidence to support participants. Gregg Mozgala, who leads the Theatre for All programming at Queens Theatre, and Alejandra Ospina, one of the first to “graduate” from the program when it first launched, can speak about the challenges faced by those with disabilities, how the pandemic has impacted them, and about how this program is working to effect changes in the larger industry.

(captions available in English & subtitles in Spanish)

VISUAL DESCRIPTION NOTE: When Gregg, Alejandra and the interviewing reporter are not speaking and shown in Zoom windows on screen, the background footage shows the “sizzle reel” of different clips from the 2018 class of TFA in action, including instructors and students.

(June 4, 2021)