THE CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Lito Casaje

Apart from being a multi-award winning playwright and screenwriter, LITO CASAJE is also a licensed optometrist, professor, theatre and independent film actor, director and producer. Lito earned his Master of Arts in Creative Writing degree from the University of the Philippines Diliman. He co-founded Dramatis Personae, a theatre-events-multi-media company with multi-award winning playwright and Harvard trained economist-banker Bienvenido M. Noriega, Jr. in 1989 and to this very day, Lito remains as DP’s president and artistic director, planning and plotting the direction and seasons of this alternative production company. He currently teaches and serves as Chair of the Communications Department, and Director of the Department of Performing Arts and Digital Cinema of La Consolacion College Manila. He likewise serves as part-time faculty of the Literature Department of the De La Salle University in Manila. Lito is a recipient of awards, citations and grants from the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, Experimental Cinema of the Philippines, Cultural Center of the Philippines, National Commission for Culture and the Arts, Manila Critics Circle, Catholic Mass Media Award, Film Academy of the Philippines and from the University of Exeter Student Drama Playwrights’ Festival. He has attended in London an advanced theatre directing workshop under the auspices of the British Council Philippines. He was also a recipient of a cultural grant to Berlin awarded by the Goethe-Institut Manila, in Stockholm to the Strindberg in Stockholm Festival awarded by the Swedish Institute, and in Oslo to the Ibsen International Stage Festival awarded by the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Manila and Norway’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Lito’s anthology of award-winning plays, ‘Mga Premyadong Dula’ (Prize-winning Plays), published by the De La Salle University Press, won the Manila Critics Circle’s 2007 National Book Award for Drama. His 2009 independent feature film, ‘Dolores,’ was in the Official Selection to the Digital Lokal section of the 11th CineManila International Film Festival, as well as in the 2010 Culture Unplugged Online International Film Festival.