photo/foto: Paula Kupfer

Two Language Lessons

Gómez-Peña leads two language lessons: Spanish for My Foreign Friends, and A Lesson on Hemi Esperanto. They both question and play with intercultural "understanding," ultimately privileging the bilingual audience members able to navigate the multiple layers of mistranslation and double meanings.

Duel with Susana Cook

An impromptu spoken word duel with Susana Cook.

Biography

Guillermo 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 came 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. His performance work and eight books have contributed to the debates on cultural diversity, identity, and US-Mexico relations. His art work has been presented at over seven hundred venues across the US, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Russia and Australia. He is a MacArthur Fellow, American Book Award winner, and a Senior Fellow of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. He is a regular contributor to National Public Radio, a writer for newspapers and magazines in the US, Mexico, and Europe, and a contributing editor to The Drama Review (NYU-MIT).