Susanna Velarde Covarrubias is a poet, playwright, musician, actor, ritual theatre practitioner & liminal artist inhabiting the crossroads of healing, alchemy, and the arts. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing–Poetry from Rutgers-Newark and studied playwriting in the lineage of María Irene Fornés at the University of Notre Dame.

An alum of the VONA/Voices of Our Nation Playwriting Fellowship and the Kennedy Center Playwriting Intensive, Susanna was also selected for multiple sessions of the Fornés Playwriting Workshop in Chicago and virtually. She has received scholarships to attend the Latinx Theatre Commons Encuentro de las Américas in Los Angeles, Sojourn Theatre’s Summer Devising Institute at Goodman Theatre in Chicago, and The Creative Center Training Ins:tute for Arts in Healthcare & Creative Aging in New York City. She has been awarded multiple grants from the Arizona Commission on the Arts and Arizona Community Foundation, including a Research & Development Grant supporting the development of her experiential play exploring cultural hybridity, grief, and mental health. She was also honored as an Outstanding Woman of Color in the Arts at the AMP Celebration of Women.

Susanna trained at Megaw Actors’ Studio and is a founding member of Mujeres del Sol, a multicultural collective upli[ing women in the arts and producing cross-disciplinary community performances. A longtime percussionist, she studied in La Habana, Cuba, and has accompanied poets, dancers, and storytellers, as well as played in bands throughout the Valley—from Latin jazz and salsa to rockabilly. Her life and travels have taken her throughout México, Cuba, Canada, Europe, and Morocco, where she studied Arabic through the Ibn Battuta Scholarship for Peace & Diplomacy.

Her poetry has been featured on PBS’ Art in the 48 and NPR’s The Show, where her video poem “Upon Leaving” premiered. She has performed her work at venues throughout Arizona, including The Nash, the Heard Museum, Tempe Center for the Arts, Phoenix Art Museum, and The Sagrado, as well as at KGB Bar in New York City and other venues across the United States. Internationally, she was invited two consecutive years to perform at the Encuentro Hispanoamericano “Horas de Junio” in Hermosillo, México. Her writing has appeared in Hush Lit, Boog City, as well as being recognized as a semifinalist for the Disquiet International Literary Prize.

Your Dreamworker

In ImaginAction Theatre’s Global Mentoring Program, she broadened her knowledge and experience in the Social Arts, including Theatre of the Oppressed, Social Presencing Theatre, and the role of myth and ritual in community work. She is a certified Health Action Training facilitator, braiding breath work, acting techniques, and applied theatre with communication in healthcare to promote health equity and person-centered care. She is a co-founder of Interpreting Culture, an organization bringing together cultural education, healthcare, and the arts to deepen communication, connection, and cultivate forms of care that honor culture and lived experience.

A certified Embodied Imagination® Practitioner, Susanna is a graduate of the three-year Advanced Embodied Imagination course, qualifying her to train future EI practitioners for certification through the International Society for Embodied Imagination (ISEI), the governing body for the method. In her prac:ce, she guides clients into the depths of the Imaginal Realm through somatic dreamwork, attending to images, emotions, and the body as portals to personal and creative transformation.

Rooted in her artistic practice, embodied imaginal work, and ancestry, Susanna has developed Ollin al-Mithal, a methodology that braids dreamwork, movement, alchemy, ritual theatre, and depth and Indigenous psychologies. She brings this methodology into bespoke courses and specialized workshops exploring liminal, decolonized approaches to creativity, healing, and transformation. She teaches nationally, internationally, and beyond -- at the thresholds, where the veil is thinnest.