Senior Fellows
Since 2007, the distinction of Senior Fellow has been awarded to scholars, artists, and activists affiliated with the Hemispheric Institute whose work exemplifies the highest achievement in the field of performance and politics. Fellows are selected by the Institute's Executive Board and named at our Encuentros.
Julio Pantoja (2016)
Julio Pantoja (Argentina) is a photographer journalist, teacher and activist. He was born in Jujuy in 1961 and moved to Tucumán in 1973 where he has been creating art that centers social issues, linked particularly to historic memory, identity and the fight for human and environmental rights. A professional architect and photo technician, Julio is also a professor and researcher in the communications department at the National University of Tucumán as well as a researcher at the National University of Rosario. He is part of New York University’s Hemispheric Institute’s Council and was part of the editorial board of Atlântica, a magazine published by the Instituto de Cultura Ibero-americana in Portimão, Portugal. Pantoja is also president of Fundación Infoto and is creator and editor of Infoto Agency. He is director of the Argentine Documentary Photography Biennial and has been a guest speaker in several academic and photographic events in Argentina, Peru, Mexico, Ecuador, Colombia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Brazil, Spain, France, Portugal, Canada, and the United States. His work is part of public and private collections such as the Museum of Fine Arts in Argentina, the Casa Nacional del Bicentenario (Argentina), Casa de las Americas (Cuba), the Art Program of the World Bank (United States), and the J. Paul Getty Museum (United States), among others. He is co-author, along with Marcelo Brodsky, of Body Politics, Corporeal Politics in Latin American Photography (La Marca Publishing House, 2009), and of Julio Pantoja, acción fotográfica 1985-2015 (edited by Fundación Infoto). His photographic work and analysis are part of influential books such as The Archive and the Repertoire (Diana Taylor, New York, 2003), Fotografía en la Argentina 1840-2010 (Fundación Arte x Arte, 2010), Las grandes fotografías del periodismo argentino (Ed. Clarín, 2010), and Charlas con Fotógrafos Latinoamericanos (Jorge Piccini, Ediciones Bex, 2015), among others. For more than 20 years Pantoja has published works in the most important graphic media, both in Argentina and abroad. Pantoja’s work is part of projects and publications at New York University, San Diego State University, University of California at Berkeley, Harvard University, Universidad Nacional de Rosario and the Universidad Nacional de Tucumán. In 2011 the Mexican Federal Ministry of Culture (FONCA-CONACULTA) offered him a scholarship as an artist-in-residence to develop the essay “Mujer, maíz y resistencia” (Women, corn, and resistance). During 2013 and 2015 he was part of the photographic project Photographers Focusing on Beijing, aimed at creating a big scale photo-journalism project of the city of Beijing. His photographs have been exhibited in galleries in Argentina, Chile, Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Ecuador, Paraguay, Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Spain, France, Portugal, United States, Canada, The Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and South Africa.
Diamela Eltit (2016)
Diamela Eltit is a Chilean writer and scholar who earned her postgraduate degree at the Universidad de Chile. For more than thirty years she has taught, attended forums, and has participated in seminars and conferences in diverse universities in Chile, Latin America, the United States, and Europe. She began her teaching career as an Associate Professor at the Technologic University in Santiago, Chile. She has been a Global Distinguished Professor at New York University since 2008, and in 2014-15 she was invited for the Simón Bolívar Cathedra in Cambridge University, U.K. In 2010 she was awarded the José Donoso Latin American Literature prize. Eltit published her first novel, Lumpérica, in 1983 and has been publishing in Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, Peru, and Mexico ever since. Her work has been translated into English, French, Italian, Finnish, and Greek. Her editorial essays on culture, literature, and politics have been collected in three books. Her writing has been the object of a number of analyses, books, essays,and seminars. An archive of her writings was also acquired by Princeton University’s library. Eltit was one of the founders of the Collective for Artistic Action (Colección de Acciones de Arte), formed in 1979 and conceived of as an expression of cultural resistance against Pinochet’s dictatorship. The Collective’s archive was donated to the Chilean Museum of Memory and Human Rights.
Rossana Reguillo (2014)
Rossana Reguillo holds a doctorate in Social Sciences, with a specialization in Social Anthropology from the CIESAS. She is a researcher (Investigadora Nacional, SNI—Sistema Nacional de Investigadores—level III) and a member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences. She is a professor in the department of Sociocultural Studies at the ITESO. Her research interests include: youth and urban cultures; the social construction of fear and the politics of affect (the emotions); as well as the cultural dimensions of narco-traffic and violence. Her published books include: Horizontes Fragmentados (Fragmented Horizons), Comunicación, cultura, pospolítica (Communication, Culture, Postpolitics), El (des)orden global y sus figuras (Global (Dis)Order and its Figures); her most recent book is Los jovenes en México (The Youth in Mexico, ed). A visiting professor at New York University, she has held the Andrés Bello Chair in Latin American Culture and Civilization (fall 2011).
Split Britches Company—Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw (2014)
Since 1981, the Split Britches Company (founded by Lois Weaver, Peggy Shaw and Deb Margolin) has written and performed in trio, duet, and solo, as well as collaborated and performed with other artists. They describe their work in this way: "Our work is rooted in popular culture, but positioned against it. It relies on moments rather than plot, relationships rather than story. It depends on the surprise of transformation rather than the logic of psychological narrative. It straddles the line between performance and theater, exploiting theatricality while exposing the pretense. It is about a community of outsiders, queers, eccentrics. It is feminist because it encourages the imaginative potential in everyone and lesbian because it takes the presence of lesbian on stage as a given." Their vaudevillian satirical gender-bending performances have received numerous awards, including a Jane Chamber award and four Village Voice OBIE awards. Their collection of scripts, "Split Britches Feminist Performance/Lesbian Practice," edited by Sue Ellen Case, won the 1997 Lambda Literary Award for Drama.
Vivian Martínez Tabares (2013)
Vivian Martínez Tabares is a critic, theatre researcher, editor and Professor. Undergraduate degree in Theatre and doctorate in Art Sciences at the Instituto Superior de Arte. Editor of the journal Conjunto and director at the Casa de las Américas and Mayo Teatral. Her most recent book is Escena y tensión social.
Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani (2013)
Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, Peru, a collective formed in 1971, travels searching paths sustained by the research of theatrical performance from the perspective of a group culture that shares diverse roots—traditional and contemporary—and whose works have resulted in unique processes beyond the material generated in the shared space.
Guillermo Goméz-Peña (2009)
Gómez-Peña is a performance artist/writer and the director of the transnational arts collective La Pocha Nostra. He was born in Mexico City and moved to the US in 1978. Since then he has been exploring cross-cultural issues with the use of performance, multilingual poetry, journalism, video, radio, and installation art.
Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, PhD (2009)
Ybarra-Frausto is an independent scholar of Latin American and U.S. Latino arts and culture. He was formally the Associate Director of Creativity and Culture at the Rockefeller Foundation. Prior to joining the Rockefeller Foundation, Dr. Ybarra-Frausto was a tenured professor at Stanford University in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. In 2007, the Mexican government bestowed “The Order of The Aztec Eagle” on Dr. Ybarra-Frausto citing his life work in fostering cultural understanding between the United States and Mexico through the arts and humanities.
Jesusa Rodríguez (2007)
Mexico’s most influential cabaret and political performance artist, recipient of an Obie Award. Often referred to as a chameleon, Rodríguez moves seemingly effortlessly and with vigor across the spectrum of cultural forms, styles, and tones. Her work challenges traditional classification, crossing with ease generic boundaries: from elite to popular to mass, from Greek tragedy to cabaret, from pre-Columbian indigenous to opera, from revue, sketch and carpa, to performative acts within political projects. She ran the famous El Hábito in Mexico City with her partner, Liliana Felipe, where they staged hundreds of shows over the course of fifteen years. Most recently, she heads up the Resistencia Creativa movement in Mexico, whose key strategy is using "massive cabaret" as a tool for political action.
Luis Millones (2007)
As one of Peru's leading historians, Luis Millones is the recipient of Peru’s National Culture Fellowship and a founding member of the Interdisciplinary Seminar of Andean Studies in Lima. He is also a member of the Chilean Academy of History and a researcher with the National Ethnology Museum of Japan. Millones currently teaches in the graduate program of Social Sciences at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Peru, is professor emeritus of the University of San Cristobal de Huamanga, Ayacucho, and a visiting professor at several universities outside Peru. He is the author of numerous articles and books on the Andean world, including Ser indio en el Perú.