Michelle J. Rodriguez (she/her) writes and performs in the worlds of music and theater. Raised in the Pacific Northwest and Kentucky by Puerto Rican parents, Michelle’s work explores kids-of-immigrants stories, divinity, queerness, intuition, joy-as-resistance, healing and spaces inbetween. Her music project MICHA was a finalist for NPR’s 2018 Tiny Desk Contest with her song “Nena Nena Nena,” with a “bilingual set spanning laid-back southern soul and Latin pop flare” (NPR). As a composer and lyricist, Michelle is a winner of the 2022 Helen Merrill Award for Playwriting, commissioned by Portland Center Stage, Baltimore Center Stage and Black Cap Productions, received a 2022 grant from NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music and Theater, and was a Van Lier Fellow at Ars Nova in their Makers Lab.
Michelle has kept up a rigorous international teaching artist practice, spending two years teaching music, theater and art at the Monteverde Friends School in Monteverde, Costa Rica and visiting King’s Academy in Madaba, Jordan twice as an artist in residence. In the United States she has worked fostering creativity and teaching songwriting and musical theater songwriting in Vermont public schools, the Chicago Public Libraries, Greenwich House Music School and the Bushwick Starr in New York, Musical Theater Factory.