Born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Pedro Eiras is a screenwriter, playwright, dramaturg and journalist currently based in Amherst, MA, where he is pursuing his MFA in Dramaturgy at the University of Massachusetts - Amherst with a full scholarship. At UMass, he has worked as a Teaching Associate, Production Assistant, Dramaturg and Director.
In the US, he has been selected as a finalist or semi-finalist for the Dramatist Guild Foundation National Fellowship, for the Neukom Institute Literary Award at Dartmouth College, for the Diverse Voices Playwriting Initiative at Illinois State University, for Company One Theater's Volt Lab, for the Playwrighty Incubator Collective, for the STX Latinx New Play Festival, for the Latino Playwriting Celebration at Texas State University, for the Dramatic Question Theater Classics in Color Program in New York, and for the LATC Encuentros! 2024 in Los Angeles. In Brazil, his projects have been selected for the Varilux Festival Screenwriting Lab and for the pitching session at the Rio Creative Conference (Rio2C), have been awarded at the Rio2C Creative Journey Project, at the Cel-UCine Festival and at the Argila Award, and have been finalists and semi-finalists at the FRAPA Screenwriting Contest (Brazil’s largest screenwriting award). More recently, he wrote the first season of the TV show “Histories of the Brazilian People” (Giro Filmes and Canal Curta) and the screenplay for the film “If I Die,” about the Military Dictatorship in Brazil, which is currently in development.
He holds a Bachelor's Degree in Journalism from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and a Master's Degree in literature and film from the University of Massachusetts - Amherst, where he specialized in media adaptation (with a focus on literary adaptations to the stage and screen). He is a US State Department alumni, having taken part in the Observing the US Institutions Program at North Carolina State University. He has two Certificates from the International Cinema Academy in Rio de Janeiro, and has developed and taught an extension program in screenwriting for TV and Film at the Catholic University of Petrópolis. As a journalist, he has worked at the United Nations Information Center in Rio de Janeiro, at the Science and Culture Forum of the Federal University of Rio, at the Federal Attorneys Office in Rio, at EducationUSA (a US Department of State organization) and at TRIAS (a Belgium NGO).
As a screenwriter, playwright and dramaturg, he is passionate about work that combines his interest in journalism and real-life stories with his excitement for narrative storytelling and adaptation (though he also loves genre writing, with science fiction and fantasy being his favorites).