The José Rivera Collection contains drafts of playwright Rivera's produced and unproduced film screenplays, TV scripts and some stage plays. The collection also contains some outlines, treatments and correspondence relating to the projects.

Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1955, José Rivera is a playwright known for his surrealist, symbolic and lyrical style. Raised in Long Island, Rivera’s first play was The House of Ramon Iglesia in 1983. As a playwright, he has received two Obie Awards for his work – one for Marisol in 1993 and one for References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot in 2001. Both were produced by the Public Theater in New York City. His plays have been produced at Playwrights Horizons, the Goodman Theatre, Yale Repertory Theater, American Conservatory Theater, La Jolla Playhouse and Ensemble Studio Theater among many others. Rivera studied magic realism with Gabriel Garcia Marquez at the Sundance Institute in Utah. In 2007, he became the first Puerto Rican writer to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for The Motorcycle Diaries. The screenplay was adapted from the journals of Che Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado as young men traveling through South America. The script was also nominated for WGA and BAFTA awards. Other films include Trade, a film about sex trafficking, which is the first film to premiere at the United Nations, On the Road based on the novel by Jack Kerouac; and the romantic comedy Letters to Juliet. Rivera has also written for television, serving as a staff writer on the short-lived Norman Lear-produced series AKA Pablo in the early 1980s. He also co-created the NBC horror science fiction series Eerie, Indiana with Karl Schaefer in 1991 and served as executive producer until 1992. In 1994, Rivera wrote Power: The Eddie Matos Story part of an HBO anthology series called Lifestories: Families in Crisis. Rivera prefers to be known as a playwright and continues to write mostly for the stage.

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