Guillermo Avilés-Rodríguez has collaborated and studied with some of the worlds best known and most respected theatre playwrights, directors, and scholars; Athol Fugard, Augusto Boal and Jorge Huerta to name a few. A remarkable feat since he hails from a part of the country where more than half of the residents live below the poverty line, and the life expectancy for black and brown males is age twenty- two.

Guillermo was born in Compton, California, and raised in Watts, a small community famed for its history of civil disobedience and social unrest. A relevant fact since Guillermo has built a career around using theatre as a way of exploring issues of social inequality as well as self-empowerment.  His study of theatre has taken him all over the Americas and to the Caribbean.

His first stop after graduating high school was Salt Lake City, Utah where he excelled both academically and artistically. On the academic front, the highlight was becoming a National Hispanic Scholar, and earning a Bachelors of Fine Arts from the University of Utah conservatory Actors Training Program. On the artistic front he earned the distinction of being the first Chicana/o ever to star in a main-stage production at the University of Utah.

Upon graduating from the University of Utah Guillermo was one of eight actors accepted into the prestigious MFA program at the University of California San Diego. At UCSD Guillermo became an active part of the political theatre movement, performing guerrilla theatre shows and political satire on campuses and at the famed Ché Café. It was the combination of growing up steeped in a culture of poverty and then transplanted to a university setting in one of the most privileged cities in California, that led Guillermo to devise a plan to study political theatre in Cuba.

In August of 2001, he flew to La Habana Cuba where he studied and collaborated with grass roots theater collectives as well as established theatre companies, most notably with márgenes del rio where he directed a survey of Latin American agitation and propaganda theatre.  Upon his return to the states on September 11 of 2001 he found a budding xenophobia that inspired his first play Prisons, an exploration of people imprisonment to ideas, creeds and political ideologies. Before graduating with his MFA he would go on to serve as the assistant director of the La Jolla Playhouse Summer Theater Program.   He has worked with paroled and group home youths for The Unusual Suspects and as a traveling drama specialist for MudTown Arts Education. He is a board member of Grupo Apolo a Spanish-language theater group in Los Angeles.  As a drama specialist and playwright/director Guillermo has worked with the Nationwide ArtsBridge outreach program as well as multiple residencies and collaborations with many after school, teen and social service programs. (L.A.?s Best, L.A. Bridges, and The Girl Blue Project as a board member). Guillermo is also a member of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. He believes in using drama to help youth channel energies into productive endeavors, as well as a socially conscious, process oriented approach to theater creation.  In 2002, Watts Village Theater Company's former Artistic Director, Quentin Drew, personally recruited Guillermo to head WVTC?s Education Program.