Native Voices Presents 11th Short Play Festival: Home

Carolina Hoyos (Quechua-Kichwa) is an actor-playwright- director, songwriter, voice artist, and 2021 Peace Studio Creative Peacebuilder. Highlights in 2021 include Macbeth, Comedy of Errors , and Romeo & Juliet with Black Girls Luv the Bard; The Bowels at Women’s Theatre Festival; and solo pieces for It’s Personal and Celebration Theatre. Film/TV credits include MTV Hits , Too Old to Die Young , and Austin Film Festival– winner Blackwater . Hoyos is a 2020 West Hollywood Directing Artist, a 2019 LA Skins TV Writer Lab Fellow, and is on the L.A. County Musicians Roster until 2024. Kainoa Kelly (Native Hawaiian) has trained at the Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis Children’s Theatre, and the Gotham Comedy Club in New York City. Recent stage roles include Jeff in Kimberly Akimbo , Sir Harry in Once Upon a Mattress , Baptist Minister/ Stephen Belber in The Laramie Project , and Josiah in an NYU- Steinhardt reading of the play Heart Strings . He is a ninth-grader at Iolani School in Honolulu, where he is a member of the International Thespian Society and high school speech team. Robert I. Mesa (Navajo/Soboba) is an artist focusing on acting, filmmaking, and photography. Currently, he appears on Grey’s Anatomy as Dr. James Chee. Other television credits include Tecumseh in The Men Who Built America: The Frontiersman , produced by Leonardo DiCaprio for the History Channel. Mesa has also performed with the Yale Repertory, Marin Theatre Company, and Portland Center Stage. He is a recipient of the 2020 Senator John Pinto Memorial Fund, which will produce his upcoming film Chindi . In 2018, his movie Devon’s Forest premiered at the Santa Fe Independent Film Festival and California’s American Indian

and Indigenous Film Festival. As a visual artist and photographer, Mesa has shown in markets at the Autry, the Heard, the Santa Fe Indian Market, and galleries in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Shanghai, China, and Bristol, United Kingdom.

Ryffin Phoenix (Navajo, Omaha) see bio above