Susanna Velarde Covarrubias is a poet, playwright, performer, and creative facilitator who lives and works in the fertile borderlands where body, dream, and imagination meet.

She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers University–Newark and pursued graduate playwriting at the University of Notre Dame, later deepening her craft through the Fornés Playwriting Method with Anne García-Romero and Migdalia Cruz. Her performances and poems have traveled across the United States and México and have appeared on PBS, NPR, and a constellation of community and university stages. Recognition for her work includes two grants from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, a VONA/Voices fellowship, a Kennedy Center Playwriting Intensive, and the AMP Outstanding Woman of Color in the Arts award.

Susanna’s facilitation style braids applied theatre, depth and Indigenous psychologies, and multiple dreamwork modalities. She is a certified Embodied Imagination® Practitioner—currently immersed in the advanced 18-month course that will license her to teach EI—and she integrates Theatre of the Oppressed, Social Presencing Theatre, and the rhythmic intelligence of her percussion studies in La Habana. Whether guiding a writer through creative blocks or leading a community into ritual performance, she invites participants to follow the ley lines of image, memory, and sensation toward transformation.

About Susanna Velarde Covarrubias

Susanna Velarde Covarrubias is a poet, playwright, performer, and creative facilitator working at the crossroads of culture, healing, and the arts. She navigates the borderlands of language, genre, geography, and consciousness—braiding the literary, theatrical, and imaginal into a body of work rooted in transformation.

Her poetry has been featured across the U.S. and México, including on PBS and NPR, and she has been honored with multiple grants and fellowships. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers University-Newark and studied playwriting at the University of Notre Dame. Her path has been shaped by visionary lineages, including her deep training in the Fornés Playwriting Method with Anne García-Romero and Migdalia Cruz, and by her certification in Embodied Imagination®—an 18-month intensive training followed by advanced certification work under the guidance of practitioners in the lineage of Jung, Robert Bosnak, and Marion Woodman.

Susanna's workshops guide individuals and communities through decolonizing creative journeys, weaving together dreamwork, depth and Indigenous psychologies, applied theatre (including Theatre of the Oppressed and the Fornés Method), alchemy, and myth. She teaches locally in Phoenix and facilitates nationally and internationally. Her work honors liminality and the wisdom of the body.

A founding member of Mujeres del Sol, a multicultural performance collective, Susanna has devised and performed cross-disciplinary work blending poetry, music, movement, and story. She studied percussion in La Habana, Cuba, and has accompanied poets, dancers, and bands throughout the Southwest. She has traveled extensively through México, Cuba, Europe, and Morocco—where she studied Arabic through a Peace and Diplomacy Scholarship.

In all she does, Susanna is committed to health equity, cultural memory, and the restoration of inner and collective voice. She is a member of the Fornés Institute, ImaginAction Theatre, the National Organization for Arts in Health.

Through The Imaginal Body, she offers dreamwork, creative mentorship, and somatic facilitation—welcoming all who feel the pull of inner movement and imaginal vision. If you are ready to step across the threshold and listen to what is alive beneath your own story, Susanna is ready to walk beside you.

Your Dreamworker