Olive Nieto
is a performance maker and an assistant professor at the UP Diliman Department of Speech Communication and Theatre Arts.
She is the co-creator of the MonoVlog, a coinage that contracts the terms “monologue” and “vlog”, a genre of online performance that bundles the various Filipino lockdown experiences as proof of life, a private conversation on social media, a health advisory, a tribute to frontliners, a death folder, a shout-out to advocacy groups, a community-led response to the pandemic, and a call for help. These components serve as the influences and substances of monologues that follow the vlogging format. The MonoVlog’s creation took place when Filipinos turned to the Internet to exercise free speech and creative expression in the time of enforced lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic.
She is a recipient of the Enhanced Creative Work and Research Grant (ECWRG) of the University of the Philippines for her collaborative work with playwright Dr. Layeta P. Bucoy and designer Mr. John Carlo V. Pagunaling entitled “El Traje Dela Cuerpo Conquistada (The Trail/Gown of the Conquered Body)”. The project acknowledges and dismantles ongoing legacies of colonialism and neo-colonialism at the local level by rendering to performance Jose Rizal’s “Noli Me Tangere”. The performance aims to participate in decolonizing narratives traversing the cultural and historical significance of saints, Maria Clara (image), and the modern day Filipina by using the traje (trail/gown) as a device that intertwines the native and the foreign, and by recognizing the agency of the colonized body in the traje.
In October 2020, she was commissioned as one of the seven Initiating Artist for Ripples, a project of Intercultural Roots.
She was also a recipient of 2022-2024 One UP Faculty Grant (FG) Award in Theatre (Performance Studies) for Outstanding Teaching and Creative Work in UP Diliman.
In 2018, she received a grant from the Japan Foundation and the Tokyo Arts Council where she performed and devised the performance “A New Normal Cinderella” with artists from Japan, Indonesia, and Taiwan at the Tokyo Festival: Asian Performing Arts Forum (APAF).
She won the Outstanding Female Featured Performance Award in the 2012 Philstage Gawad Buhay Awards for her performance in PETA’s Bona.
She acts and directs at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) and the Writer’s Bloc’s the Virgin Labfest.
Areas of interest: theatre/film/tv acting; embodied dramaturgy in performance; performance in digital/online platforms; contemporary performance.
Currently training in gymnastics, freediving, mermaiding, bowling, kali, and juggling.
Olive Nieto 