EMERGENYC 2015: About the Faculty

Lead Faculty, George Emilio Sánchez

George Emilio Sánchez is the Chairperson of the Department of Performing and Creative Arts at the College of Staten Island (CUNY). He teaches undergraduate courses in the Drama program and graduate courses for the Education Department. He has directed five original student productions for the PCA and continues to work with students and classes with the goal of creating original theater/ performance works. He continues to work as a teaching artist outside of the college demonstrating how the arts can be utilized in education across disciplines. Most recently he was the resident teaching artist for the Bronx Museum of the Arts for their Action Lab Theater. In this capacity he worked with teachers and artists teaching them Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed techniques. As a result of his work in education he was the recipient of the Brooklyn Arts Exchange 2006 Arts Educator Award. His most recent performance work with collaborator Patricia Hoffbauer, The Architecture of Seeing-REMIX, was presented at La MaMa in 2006. In 2004 they premiered Milagro at Dance Theater Workshop. A year earlier Hoc Est Corpus/This Is A Body premiered at Symphony Space in April 2003. His third solo performance ROSA premiered at Dixon Place in 2002. His first solo performance, Chief Half-Breed in the Land of In-Between, was commissioned and premiered at Dance Theater Workshop and was also part of Mo’ Madness curated by George C. Wolfe at The Public Theater. His second solo performance piece, LATINDIO also premiered in New York City and both pieces have since been performed in over 20 states as well as in Puerto Rico and Peru. He has collaborated with Brazilian choreographer Patricia Hoffbauer on numerous pieces. Among those are A Night in La Mezcla and The Architecture of Seeing. As an artistic associate under JoAnne Akalaitis he created the Latino Lab at the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater. He has garnered two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships for Performance Art/Emergent Forms and was a Fulbright Scholar to Peru in 1994.

Invited Artist Faculty 

Avram Finkelstein

Avram Finkelstein is an artist and writer living in Brooklyn. His work has shown at The Whitney Museum, The Cooper Hewitt Museum, Kunsthalle Wien and Exit Art and is in the permanent collections of MoMA, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum, The New Museum, The Smithsonian, The Brooklyn Museum and The Victoria and Albert Museum. Finkelstein is a founding member of the Silence=Death Collective and the art collective, Gran Fury, with whom he collaborated on public art projects for international institutions including The Whitney, ArtForum, MOCA LA, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, Creative Time, and The Public Art Fund. The collective had its first retrospective at 80 WSE in 2012, and has work in the permanent collections of The Whitney, MoMA, The New Museum and The New York Public Library. Finkelstein has been asked to speak about art, political activism, LGBTQ politics, and cultural production, the American Left, and art and intellectual property by Harvard, Columbia, NYU, Fordham, RISD, MassArt, The School of Visual Arts, CUNY, Concordia University, UMASS and by the Arts and Labor Working Group of Occupy Wall Street. He has been interviewed by The New York Times, Frieze, Artforum, Bomb and Interview, produced art and culture features for Italian Vogue, Dazed and Confused, and Visionaire, and written about art and culture for Artwrit, Van, Dune, NY Arts Magazine and the New York Public Library. He has created public awareness campaigns for AmFAR, The AIDS Policy Project, The Campaign To End AIDS, ACT UP, POZ, United Against AIDS, and ACRIA.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (EMERGE'08)

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ plays include Neighbors (Public Theater), Appropriate (Signature Theater, OBIE Award for Best New Play, Outer Critics Circle nominee), An Octoroon (Soho Rep, OBIE Award for Best New Play), War (Yale Rep, forthcoming), and Gloria (Vineyard Theater, forthcoming). His work has been or will be seen at the Actors Theater of Louisville, Victory Gardens Theatre, Woolly Mammoth Theater, The Matrix Theater, CompanyOne, Theater Bielefeld in Germany and the HighTide Festival in the UK. He is currently a Residency Five playwriting fellow at Julliard. Other honors include the Paula Vogel Award, a Fulbright Arts Grant, a Helen Merrill Award, the Dorothy Strelsin playwriting fellowship, and the inaugural Tennessee Williams Award. He is a Princeton alum from the Class of 2006 and holds an MFA in Performance Studies from NYU.

Fulana

Fulana is a video collective in that emerged as the vision-fusion of four New York-based Latina artists joined by a love of video and performance, a critical gaze, a bilingual sense of humor and —most of all— a shared desire to create art within a collaborative onda. So we put our Spanglish brains together, drank some coffee, and founded Fulana in 2000. Through parody and satire, we explore themes that are relevant to Latino cultures in the U.S., delving into the nuances that bind our experiences, experimenting with strategies to make visible what we're so often made to read between the lines. Our work, whose aesthetic ranges from cable-access kitsch to Telemundo tinsel, consists mainly of mock television commercials, music videos and print advertisements. Focusing on popular culture, we respond to the ways ideologies and identities are marketed to us, sold to us—and how we sell ourselves—through the mass media. (Marlène Ramírez-Cancio, Lisandra María Ramos, Andrea Thome) www.fulana.org

Patricia Hoffbauer

Pat Hoffbauer is a dance artist and educator. She teaches at Hunter College and Princeton and performs with Yvonne Rainer. Her work Para-dice (stage 1) was presented by Danspace Project as part of Platform and stage 2 is on its way!

Debra Levine

Debra Levine is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at New York University and is an affiliated faculty member of the Department of Undergraduate Drama at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and The Hemispheric Institute for Politics and Performance. Debra received her doctorate in 2012 from New York University’s Department of Performance Studies where she was a recipient of the J. Ndukaku Amankulor Award for Academic Excellence and a two time NEH Vectors Fellow at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy (2010, 2011). Debra’s work explores the intersection between performance, politics and new media/digital humanities in the 20th and 21st century through the lens of feminist and queer theory, disability studies, and visual studies. deblevine.blogspot.com

Jeca Rodríguez-Colón (EMERGE'13)

Jeca Rodríguez-Colón is a Puerto Rican dancer and choreographer, she began her contemporary dance training with Petra Bravo and Viveca Vázquez. In 2002 moved to New York City where she completed her B.A. at Hunter College with a double major in Dance and Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Jeca is the recipient of Hunter College’s 2005 Choreography Departmental Award. Jeca is pursuing her MFA in Creative Practices at Transart Institute where she began to explore video and objects as a medium. After participating in the EMERGENYC 2013 program at the Hemispheric Institute she began to explore performance arts and public interventions. Her work is connected to different aspects of the maternal kinesthetic language in space and the politics that surrounds it. Her latest work includes a street performance “Mother’s Milk is Free”, an installation performance “I ____ Creatures” and object based pieces “Because… I” and “Because… II”.  jecarodriguezcolon.carbonmade.com

Ed Woodham

For more than 25 years, Ed Woodham has been active in community art, education, and civic interventions, across a variety of media and cultural contexts. A visual and performance artist, puppeteer, and curator, Woodham employs humor, irony, subtle detournement, and a striking visual style in order to encourage greater consideration of--and provoke deeper critical engagement with--the urban environment. Woodham created Art in Odd Places (AiOP) to present visual and performance art to reclaim public spaces in New York City and beyond. AiOP has stretched the boundaries of communication in the public realm by presenting artworks, in all disciplines, outside the traditional venues of galleries, museums and theaters. Art in Odd Places has been produced in Los Angeles CA, Boston MA, Indianapolis IN, Greensboro NC in the U.S.; Saint Petersburg, Russia, and Sydney, Australia. AiOP was selected as a representative in the U.S. Pavilion, Spontaneous Interventions:Design Actions for the Common Good at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2012. Woodham is a member of the faculty at School of Visual Arts in NYC for City as Site: Public Art as Social Intervention and a 2013 Blade of Grass Fellow in Social Engagement. For summer 2014, Ed was selected for the drawing(shed) residency to create a performance work in Lloyd Park, East London. www.artinoddplaces.org