Augusto Boal was born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1931. Orignally, Boal was trained in chemical engineering and attended Columbia University in the late 1940′s and early 1950′s in which he graduated with a PHD. Nevertheless, his interests in life shifted towards his childhood obsession with the theatrical world and therefore just after he finished his degree at Columbia University he was asked to return to Brazil to work with the Arena Theatre in São Paulo. His remarkable work at the Arena Theatre led Boal to experiment with new forms of theatre; especially in a political sense. As a result, these fresh theatrical techniques would flourish and have a massively successful impact on the world of theatre.
During the 1960's Boal and his theatrical movement was labelled as a form cultural activism which the Brazilian military coups; who based themselves on imperialism, saw as a huge threat to their influence. Consequently, In 1971 Boal was kidnapped off the street, arrested, tortured, and eventually exiled to Argentina, where he stayed for 5 years. In response to his mistreatment and the political and social state of Brazil, Boal published Theatre of the oppressed in 1973 which is based on Boal's method of 'spect actors- in which the spectator replaces actor to determine the solution to a given problem presented by the actor, which can also be a real problem someone in the community is facing'. Boal over the next few decades became an icon of the theatrical world and took his work to places like Paris. He became such as figurehead in Brazil that between 1992-96 he was elected as the Vereador (City councilor) in Rio.
On May 2, 2009 at the age of 78, Augusto Boal died in Rio de Janeiro of a respiratory failure after a long fight against leukemia.
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