Elio Leturia

Born in Lima, Peru, he started acting at 16 under Carlos Padilla’s direction, performing in the Greek play ErosOrestiada with the Universidad de Lima Theater Group (TUL). He returned to the stage with Teatro Comunidad de Lima in When the Marionettes Spoke by Teatro Taller de Colombia. He wrote and starred in the theatrical adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s novella The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother, receiving excellent reviews for his portrayal of the grandmother, followed by a role as Pedrosa in García Lorca’s Mariana Pineda. In 2009, with Aguijón Theater, Leturia played the salesman in Monday Falls on León Rodríguez, inspired by Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. An ensemble member since 2010, other credits include Sophocles’ Antigone, The Passion of Antígona Pérez by Luis Rafael Sánchez, Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Respectful Prostitute, Carlos Fuentes’ Orchids in the Moonlight, and Exquisite Agony by Nilo Cruz.

Celebrating Aguijón Theater thirtieth anniversary in 2019, Leturia wrote, edited and designed the bilingual illustrated book Aguijón 30 Years. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, he has led Aguizoóm, Let’s Talk Theater with Aguijón, an initiative to bridge the extensive downtime in public theatrical activities. Leturia holds a bachelor’s in communications from the Universidad de Lima and a master’s in visual journalism from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, earned through a Fulbright Foreign Student scholarship. With extensive experience as a designer and art director for newspapers and magazines in both Peru and the U.S., he merges written and visual journalistic endeavors with his academic career. Since 2005, he has been teaching graphic design and multimedia journalism at Columbia College Chicago and received a Fulbright Senior Scholar Award in 2022 to teach at the Universidad de Málaga, Spain.