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.
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.
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!
Fulana
www.fulana.org
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.
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).
Dulce Pinzón
www.dulcepinzon.com
Dulce Pinzón was born in Mexico City in 1974. She studied Mass Media Communications at the Universidad de Las Americas in Puebla Mexico and Photography at Indiana University in Pennsylvania. In 1995 she moved to New York where she studied at The International Center of Photography. As a young Mexican artist living in the US, Dulce soon found new inspiration for her photography in feelings of nostalgia, questions of identity, and political and cultural frustrations. In her black and white series “Viviendo en el Gabacho” (a Mexican colloquialism for living in the US) she illustrates the dualistic phenomenon of the integration of the Mexican immigrant into the New York landscape. This concept of dualism was further developed when she used nostalgic iconograpic images from a Mexican card game projected over the naked bodies of her New York friends and loved ones in “Loteria”. “Multiracial” portrayed subjects of multiracial heritage against primary color backgrounds, exposing the frailty of our concepts of race. “The Real Story of the superheroes” comes full circle to reintroduce the Mexican immigrant in New York in a satirical documentary style featuring ordinary men and women in their work environment donning superhero garb, thus raising questions of both our definition of heroism and our ignorance of and indifference to the workforce that fuels our ever-consuming economy. In her latest project “People I like” she does studio portraits of divas, rock stars, party goers, drama queens and artists, people that fascinate her; all of them Latinos. They are part of what she believes to be a breakthrough in the Latino cultural scene of New York City. Her work has been published and collected internationally. In 2001 her photos were used for the cover of a publication of Howard Zinn’s book “A People’s History of the United States”. In 2002 Dulce won the prestigious Jovenes Creadores grant in Mexico for her work. In 2006 she won an Honorific Mention in the Santa Fe project competition and she won the 12th edition of the Mexican Biennial of El Centro de La Imagen. Dulce was a 2006 fellow in Photography from the New York Foundation for the Arts and is now participating in the 2007 fall session of the Bronx Museum’s AIM program. She is currently a Ford Foundation fellow and lives in Brooklyn New York.
Carmelita Tropicana
Cuban-born writer/performance artist Carmelita Tropicana received an Obie award in 1999 for "Sustained Excellence" and was named "One of the Most Notable Women of 1998" by El Diario newspaper. She and director Ela Troyano won Best Short at the 1994 Berlin Film Festival for Carmelita Tropicana: Your Kunst is Your Waffen. Her collaboration with Marga Gomez, Single Wet Female, earned a 2002 GLAAD Media Award nomination. In 2000, Beacon Press published a comprehensive collection of her plays and scripts I, Carmelita Tropicana -- Performing Between Cultures, a Lambda Award nominee. INTAR Theatre produced the solo With What Ass Does a Cockroach Sit? in 2004 Her work has been presented at venues including the ICA in London, Centre de Cultura Contemporanea in Barcelona, Thalia Theater in Hamburg, PS 122 in New York, Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, and Brava Theater in San Francisco. Tropicana has received numerous writing and performance awards from groups including the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Mark Taper Forum's Latino Initiative.