Patricia Achiro Olwoch is an award-winning Ugandan writer, director, and producer from Gulu, currently based in New York. She is a Visiting Scholar and Instructor at Vassar College, where she teaches playwriting and postcolonial drama, with an emphasis on storytelling as a site of memory, resistance, and political imagination.
Her recent work centers on questions of exile, nationhood, and belonging. She is the playwright of Uganda My Mother and The Exiled President, two new works that interrogate power, displacement, and the fragile intimacy between citizen and state. Alongside her theatrical practice, she is developing a series of epistolary books, including When They Stopped Clapping and Lutino Pa Lamera, which explore inheritance, grief, and the act of writing across generations.
Achiro’s broader body of work spans theatre, film, and television. She is the creator and writer of the television series Coffee Shop and head writer of Yat Madit, and her short films—including The Surrogate, TheMineral Basket, and Maraya Ni—have received international recognition. Her play The Survival premiered at Lincoln Center with National Queer Theatre in 2022 and returned for a full production at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in 2024.
A former Weiss International Fellow and Scholar at Risk at Barnard College (2023–2024), her writing has appeared in Guernica, Exposition Review, Westbeth, PEN America, and ADI Magazine. She serves as the African Representative on the Women Playwrights International Management Committee, is a member of National Queer Theatre’s Artistic Collective, and mentors emerging writers through CriminalQueerness Studio.
Twitter:@achirop
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/patricia-olwoch-0b200b8
Website: www.achiropolwoch.com
