EMERGENYC 2017: 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
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
Ricardo Gamboa
Ricardo Gamboa is an artist, activist and academic working in his native Chicago and New York City. In Chicago, he is a company member of Barrel of Monkeys, Southside Ignoramus Quartet and Free Street Theater. He is the founding Artistic Director of Teatro Americano and founding adult partner of the controversial youth ensemble The Young Fugitives. In New York, he was a fellow of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics EmergeNYC program, company member of the New York Neo-Futurists, and has performed at a range of institutional and underground venues. He is a graduate of the University of Illinois, Urbana; received his Master’s in Arts Politics from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts; and is currently pursuing his doctorate degree in American Studies at NYU’s Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. His short film “The Southside Has Many Beauty Queens” was winner of the Best Short at Chicago Latino Film Festival and his feature debut “Maydays” received standing-only crowds and critical praise from the festival. Gamboa is the winner of several awards, fellowships and grants including a Joyce Award, NEA Artworks Award, MacArthur Foundation International Connections Award and Latino ImPACT Playwrights Award. He is a Playwright-in-Residence at Chicago Dramatists. This year, he was a finalist for Sundance Film Festival Latino Film Fellowship and Latino Screen Writing Project. He is a Critical Collaborations Fellow at NYU’s Global Network University (2016-2018). He has worked with over 5,000 young people in the United States and Latin America. His current projects include the decolonial and queer webseries BRUJOS and the live news show and podcast, The Hoodoisie.
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.
Sonia Guiñansaca
Sonia Guiñansaca is a Queer Migrant Poet , Cultural Organizer, and Activist from Harlem by way of Ecuador. Guiñansaca a VONA/Voices alumni who has performed at El Museo Del Barrio, The Nuyorican Poets Cafe, NY Poetry Festival, Galleria de La Raza, and featured on NBC, PBS, Latina Magazine, Pen American, and the Poetry Foundation to name a few. She has presented keynotes, workshops, panels at universities throughout the country. She has been named as 1 of 10 Up and Coming Latinx Poets You Need to Know by Remezcla, as well as one of 13 Coolest Queers on the Internet by Teen Vogue, and recently announced as the 2017's Artist in Residency at NYU's Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. She has emerged as a national leader in the undocumented/migrant artistic and political communities. In 2007, Guiñansaca came out publicly as an undocumented immigrant. Since then she has co-founded and help build some of the largest undocumented organizations in the country, coordinating and participating in groundbreaking civil disobedience actions in the immigrant rights movement. She has also founded some of the first creative artistic projects by and for undocumented writers/artists. Currently she is working on her full length poetry manuscript on migration, queerness, and her change in immigration status from undocumented to documented. She is the Knowledge Lab & Operations Manager, and coordinator of the UndocuWriting project at CultureStrike. soniaguinansaca.com
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!
Pamela Sneed
Pamela Sneed is a New York-based poet, writer and actress. She has been featured in the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Time Out, Bomb, VIBE, and on the cover of New York Magazine. In 2015, she appeared in Art Forum and The Huffington Post. She hosted Queer Art Film at the IFC in New York City. She is author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom Than Slavery, published by Henry Holt in April 1998, KONG & Other Works, published by Vintage Entity Press (2009) and a Lincoln (2014). In 2015, she published the Chaplet Gift with Belladonna. She appears in Nikki Giovanni’s The 100 Best African American Poems. She has performed original works for sold out houses at Lincoln Center, P.S. 122, Ex-Teresa in Mexico City, The ICA London, The CCA in Glasgow Scotland, The Green Room in Manchester England, BAM Cafe, Central Park Summer Stage and recently Columbia University's Tribute to James Baldwin, The Whitney Museum and BRIC. At current she teaches in the department of Journalism and Communication at LIU and is a Visiting Professor at Chicago’s School of the Art Institute teaching Human Rights and Writing Art. Her forthcoming book, Sweetdreams, will be published by Belladona in 2017.
Ed Woodham
Ed Woodham has been active in community art, education, and civic interventions across media and culture for over twenty-five years. 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. Woodham teaches at School of Visual Arts for City as Site: Social Interventions and Public Performance. He was a 2013 Blade of Grass Fellow in Social Engagement. For summer 2014, Ed was selected for thedrawing(shed) residency IdeasFromElse[W]here to create a performance work in Lloyd Park, East London. He was a featured speaker for TEDxGowanus and TEDxIndianapolis in 2014. For 2016 he was commissioned to create a socially engaged work for Jamaica FLUX at The Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning in Queens, NY and was awarded a commission by The Gowanus Public Arts Initiative to create The Keepers, in his longtime neighborhood of Gowanus, Brooklyn. www.edwoodham.com