Santiago Manuel Sosa moved to the United States from Guayaquil, Ecuador after graduating high school. He earned his BFA from Texas State University and his MFA from the University of Wisconsin. He has worked at New York Theatre Company, American Players Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Great River Shakespeare Festival, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Writers Theatre, Illinois Shakespeare Festival, Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, Island Shakespeare Festival, Muse of Fire Shakespeare at Sloss, Door Shakespeare, Forward Theatre Co., Definition Theatre Company, Athenaeum Center for Cultural Arts - Chicago, Tennessee Performing Arts Center, Nashville Children’s Theater, Studio Tenn, Shakespeare Rep, and From the Branch—where he served as Artistic Director for six years, directing more than fifteen productions that toured to over fifty cities across the United States.

After graduate school, Santiago moved to Chicago, working in theatre, commercials, voice-over, and print while training in comedy at iO Theater. From Chicago he relocated to Nashville, where he spent four years as an Artistic Associate with the Nashville Shakespeare Festival. During his time at NSF he worked as an actor, director, fight choreographer, costume designer, voice and text coach, and the Apprentice Company Director. Alongside his work at the festival, he served as an adjunct professor, teaching Shakespeare, Period Styles, Voice and Diction, Advanced Voice, Stage Combat, Beginning Acting, Technical Theatre for Directors, Intro to Theatre, Power Plays - Shakespeare and Business, Children’s Theatre, and Theatre Appreciation at Vanderbilt University, Middle Tennessee State University, Lipscomb University, and Belmont University. He was the Fred Coe Artist-in-Residence at Vanderbilt twice (2016 and 2019), teaching Shakespeare and directing A Shayna Maidel in 2016 and Twelfth Night in 2019.

Since 2016, Santiago has focused much of his energy on directing after an eight-year break from the director’s chair. In the fall of 2019, he moved from Nashville to Lawrence, Kansas to work as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Voice and Movement at the University of Kansas. In 2021 he wrote, adapted, and devised Musings of Fire, a multimedia, COVID-safe co-production for KU and Island Shakespeare Festival. Later that fall, he accepted a new appointment at the University of Alabama at Birmingham as Assistant Professor and Head of Performance, where he teaches Shakespeare, Voice, Movement, Dialects and Accent Acquisition, and Stage Combat.

Santiago is the recipient of the Horton Foote Scholarship for Playwriting, the Robert Yeager Award for Directing, the First Night Award for Outstanding Costume Design (Julius Caesar), and the Advanced Opportunity Fellowship for Acting. He is also certified in multiple weapons by the Society of American Fight Directors and Dueling Arts International.