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.
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 8 books.
Patricia Hoffbauer
Patricia Hoffbauer is a choreographer, director, and writer whose work has been presented throughout South and North America. Originally from Brazil, she has been developing her own work and collaborating with different artists in New York City for the last decade. She is interested in dramatically exploring a language that juxtaposes literal life situations with the body as a primary source of expression.
Reverend Billy
www.revbilly.com
Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir believe that Consumerism is overwhelming our lives. The corporations want us to have experiences only through their products. Our neighborhoods, "commons" places like stoops and parks and streets and libraries, are disappearing into the corporatized world of big boxes and chain stores. But if we "back away from the product" - even a little bit, well then we Put The Odd Back In God! The supermodels fly away and we're left with our original sensuality. So we are singing and preaching for local economies and real - not mediated through products -- experience. We like independent shops where you know the person behind the counter or at least - you like them enough to share a story.We ask that local activists who are defending themselves against supermalls, nuke plants, gentrification -- call us and we'll come and put on our "Fabulous Worship!" Remember children... Love is a Gift Economy!
Nicolás Dumit-Estévez
www.longwoodarts.org/Artists/nicolas/
Nicolás Dumit Estévez is an interdisciplinary artist who has exhibited and performed extensively in the US as well as internationally at venues such as Madrid Abierto/ARCO, Idensitat, The IX Havana Biennial, The III International Theatre Festival of Santo Domingo, PERFORMA 05 and 07, Longwood Arts Project/Bronx Council on the Arts, The Queens Museum, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, among others. His most recent work includes For Art’s Sake, a series of seven secular pilgrimages to seven museums in the New York metropolitan area, presented with LMCC and the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art. For the intervention In His Shoes, presented as part of Five Alive and the Prague Quadrennial in 2007, Estévez embodied the Holy Infant of Prague in His world place of residence. His upcoming projects include Thirty Two Letters to my Dentist, a publication to be launched at the Center for Book Arts in the spring of 2008. In September of the same year he performs and exhibits The Passerby Museum, an ongoing public intervention in collaboration with María Alós, at the Claremont Museum of Art in Los Angeles. Born in Santiago de los Treinta Caballeros, Dominican Republic. Estévez lives and works in the South Bronx.
Karen Finley
www.karenfinley.com
Karen Finley is a New York based artist whose raw and transgressive performances have long provoked controversy and debate. She has appeared and exhibited internationally her visual art, performances and plays. Her performances have been presented at Lincoln Center, New York City, The Guthrie, Minneapolis, American Repertory Theatre, The ICA in London, Harvard, The Steppenwolf in Chicago, and The Bobino in Paris. Her artworks are in numerous collections and museums including the Pompidou in Paris and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. . Finley attended the San Francisco Art Institute receiving an MFA and honorary PHD. She has received numerous awards and fellowships including a Guggenheim, 2 Obies, 2 Bessies, MS. Magazine Woman Of The Year, NARAL Person of the Year(which she shared with Anna Quindlen and Walter Cronkite), NYSCA and NEA Fellowships. She has appeared in many independent films and appeared in the film Philadelphia. She has authored and or edited seven books including Shock Treatment (City Lights 1990), Enough is Enough (Poseidon, Simon and Schuster 1993), Living It Up (Doubleday 1996), Pooh Unplugged (Smart Art Books 1999), A Different Kind Of Intimacy: The Collected Writings of Karen Finley (Thunders Mouth Press 2000), she edited and contributed to Aroused” A Collection of Erotic Writings (Thunders Mouth Press 2001) and George and Martha (Verso 2006).