EMERGENYC 2016: 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
Susana Cook
Susana Cook, born in Argentina, is a New York based playwright, director and performer who has been producing original work for over 20 years. Her work has been presented in numerous performance spaces in New York City, including Dixon Place, PS. 122, W.O.W Cafe Theater, Ubu Rep, Theater for the New City, The Puffin Room and The Kitchen. She has also performed internationally in Spain, France, India, Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, Canada and at several colleges and universities around the country. Some of her latest shows are include : Homeland Insecurities, The idiot King, The Values Horror Show, 100 Years of Attitude, Dykenstein, Hamletango, Prince of Butches, Gross National Product, Hot Tamale, Conga Guerrilla Forest, The Fraud, Butch Fashion Show in the Femme Auto Body Shop, Rats and Tango Lesbiango She is the recipient of several fellowships and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Arts International, Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, The Franklin Furnace Archives, The Puffin Foundation and INTAR. www.susanacook.com
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.
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
Ebony Noelle Golden
Houston, TX native, Ebony Noelle Golden, is a public scholar, performance artist and director of Betty's Daughter Arts Collaborative. She also serves as the artistic director of Body Ecology Performance Ensemble. BDAC specializes in creative workshops, curriculum development, cultural and performance art design for progressive social change. Working nation-wide, her work spans creative, academic and community organizing spheres. Ebony believes that liberation is a precarious and awesomely terrifying pursuit; yet she is wholly dedicated to activating art, culture and education for liberation and transformation of individuals and communities. Golden’s approach to community arts and cultural design is steeped in the practices of black women, activism, experimental performance and secular/spirituality that honors and affirms individuals and communities working to be self-actualized, self-determined, creative and liberated. Recognized as a Woman Warrior by Casa Atabex Ache and a Black Girl Geek in Arts & Culture by Lived Unchained, Ebony’s work has been supported by a variety of organizations including: New York University, Alternate Roots, We Shall Overcome Fund, Fund for Southern Communities, Soul Mountain Poetry Center, The Highlander Center for Research and Education, Cave Canem Foundation, North Carolina Humanities Council, State of the Nation and Atlantic Center for the Arts. Currently Golden is conjuring RingShout for Reproductive Justice (cultural arts campaign), Weaving Revolution: A Tool Kit for Cultural Organizers, Black Fantastic: New Media Exhibit, The Body Ecology: Performing Cultural Arts Direct Action (tool kit) and "again, the watercarriers”, a book of poems.
Guillermo Gómez-Peña
www.pochanostra.com
Performance artist/writer Guillermo Gómez-Peña resides in San Francisco where he is artistic director of La Pocha Nostra. Born in 1955 and raised in Mexico City, he traveled to the U.S. in 1978 to study Post-Studio Art at Cal Arts. His pioneering work in performance, video, installation, poetry, journalism, cultural theory and radical pedagogy explores cross-cultural issues, immigration, the politics of language, "extreme culture" and new technologies. A MacArthur Fellow and American Book Award winner, he is a regular contributor to National Public Radio, a writer for newspapers and magazines in the U.S., Mexico, and Europe, and a contributing editor to The Drama Review (NYU-MIT). For twenty-five years, Gómez-Peña has been exploring intercultural issues and border culture with the use of mixed genres and experimental languages. Continually developing multi-centric narratives and large-scale performance projects from a border perspective, Gómez-Peña creates what critics have termed "Chicano cyber-punk performances" and "ethno-techno art." In his work, cultural borders have moved to the center while the alleged mainstream is pushed to the margins and treated as exotic and unfamiliar, placing the audience members in the position of "foreigners" or "minorities." He mixes experimental aesthetics and social reality, English and Spanish, Chicano humor and activist politics to create a "total experience" for the viewer/reader/audience member. These strategies can be found in his live performance work, his award-winning video art pieces, and his books.
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!
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (EMERGENYC '08 alumn)
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.
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
Jennifer Miller/ Circus Amok
Jennifer Miller is a playwright, performer and the director and founder of Circus Amok. She has been working with alternative circus forms, theater, and dance, and for over twenty years. She is the recipient of the 2008 Ethyl Eichelberger Award. Her work with Circus Amok was awarded a “Bessie” (a New York Dance and Performance Award) in 1995 and an OBIE in 2000. Circus Amok is the subject of a French documentary film, “Un Cirque a New York” 2002 and Brazilian documentary, “Juggling Politics” 2004. As a dancer she has performed with Cathy Weis, Jeff Weis, Jenny Monson, John Jasperse, Johanna Boyce, Doug Elkins, and They Won’t Shut-up among others. She had a seven year stint at Coney Island Sideshow by the Seashore. She toured her solo shows Morphadyke and Free Toasters Everyday here and abroad. She is the author of Cracked Ice or The Jewels of the Forbidden Skates and The Golden Racket. She is an associate professor of performance at Pratt Institute.
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