Marcos Antônio Alexandre (2016-2017)
Marcos Antônio Alexandre has an undergraduate degree in Portuguese, English and Spanish from the Languages Department of Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (1995), where he has also earned a Master’s degree (1998) and a PhD (2004) in Literature Studies, defending a doctoral dissertation entitled Juan Radrigán e Plínio Marcos: contextos e textos dramáticos espetaculares (“Juan Radrigán and Plínio Marcos: spectacular dramatic contexts and texts”). In 2008-2009, Alexandre conducted a post-doctorate research on Black Theater entitled Brasil e Cuba em diálogo: a cultura afrodescendente em cena (“Brazil-Cuba Dialogue: the afro-descendent culture on stage”) at the School of Performing Arts of Instituto Superior de Arte – ISA in Havana, Cuba, and in the Post-Graduate Performing Arts Program at Universidade Federal da Bahia in Salvador, Brazil. Currently a researcher at CNPq, Alexandre is an Associate Professor at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, where he has been teaching Spanish and Hispanic Literature in the Languages Department’s Spanish Program since 1999 and Literary Theory in the Post-Graduate Program since 2005. Alexandre has also taught courses on spectacular text and dramaturgical text theories in the Theater Department of the School of Fine Arts since 2000. Alexandre has been a member of the Mayombe Grupo de Teatro since its inception, in 1995. He is the coordinator of NEIA – Núcleo de Estudos Interdisciplinares da Alteridade (“Center for Interdisciplinary Study of Otherness”) and co-coordinator of PLTA – Programa Letras e Textos em Ação (“Literature and Text in Action Program”). He is also a member of the research groups NELAP – Núcleo de Estudos em Letras e Artes Performáticas (Center for the Study of Literature and Performing Arts”) and NELAM – Núcleo de Estudos latino-americanos (“Center for Latin American Studies”). Alexandre has done research on the following topics: Hispanic literature, performances, Afro-Brazilian rituals, black theater and Latin American theater. He has published and organized books and magazines and has articles, essays and chapters featured in national and international publications.
Nicholás D’Avella is an ethnographer of contemporary Argentina with research interests in markets, expert knowledge, and urban ecologies. His work brings concern with practices of knowledge developed through engagement with Science and Technology Studies into dialogue with anthropological themes related to money, exchange, and value. His current manuscript, Concrete Dreams: Markets, Politics, and the Lives of Buildings in Post-Crisis Buenos Aires, is an ethnographic study of a construction boom in the early post-crisis years. Based on two years of fieldwork with real estate investors and market analysts, architects, and neighborhood residents, the book describes how buildings were incorporated into emergent practices of economic investment, and how other forms of value — particularly those of architecture, neighborhood life, and democratic politics — were made to endure in the face of buildings' increasingly central place in Argentine investment cultures. D’Avella’s next project, Developing Economics: Unorthodox Economists in Argentina and Beyond, is a study of post-neoliberal economic knowledge and policy in Latin American urban financial centers. The project tracks two groups of "unorthodox economists" and the ways they have reconfigured the landscape of economic knowledge and policy in Latin America: on the one hand, formally trained economists whose work operates at the edge of recognition of the discipline's mainstream; on the other, everyday people who have been trained not in universities, but through cultural and historical experiences of life in turbulent economies.
Cristóbal Bianchi is an artist and researcher. He holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London. He founded the Casagrande art collective (www.loscasagrande.org) with Joaquin Prieto and Julio Carrasco, which has developed a series of editorial and public art interventions in the public sphere e.g King Kong, HH, and the Bombing of Poems that consists of dropping one hundred thousand poems printed as bookmarks from an aircraft. This intervention has occurred seven times to date over cities that have experience aerial bombing during military confrontations: Santiago de Chile (2001), Dubrovnik (2002), Guernica (2004), Warsaw (2009), Berlin (2010), London (2014) and Milan (2015). As an editor a he has developed the online platform Observatorio Cultural from the Consejo Nacional de la Cultura y las Artes (observatoriocultural.gob.cl). Currently, he is director of a new MA degree called “Creación e investigación artística contemporánea” at the Universidad Mayor in Chile and is a Visiting Scholar at the Hemispheric Institute at NYU, where he is conducting research about the use of the sky and the vertical space in contemporary art. He is based in Austin and New York.
Catherine Lord, Professor of Studio Art and affiliated faculty, Department of Women’s Studies and Department of Visual Culture, is a writer, artist, and curator whose work addresses issues of feminism, cultural politics, and colonialism. She is the author of the text/image experimental narrative, The Summer of Her Baldness: A Cancer Improvisation (University of Texas Press), the conceptual translation Sa Calvitie, Son Colibri: Miss Translation (L’une Bevue) and (in collaboration with Richard Meyer), Art and Queer Culture, 1885-2005 (Phaidon Press, 2011). She is at work on a text/image project titled, The Effect of Tropical Light on White Men. Her critical essays and her fiction have been published in Afterimage, Art & Text, Artcoast, New Art Examiner, Whitewalls, Framework, Documents, Art Journal, GLQ, X-tra and Art Paper, Artforum and October, as well as the collections The Contest of Meaning, Illuminations: Women Writing on Photography from the 1850s to the Present, Reframings: New American Feminisms in Photography, The Passionate Camera, Hers 3, Space, Site and Intervention: Issues in Installation and Site-Specific Art, and Decomposing. She was an essayist for the exhibition catalog, WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, as well as for the Marlene McCarty retrospective, I’m into you now. Her curated exhibitions include "Pervert," "Trash," “Gender, fucked,” and "Memories of Overdevelopment: Philippine Diaspora in Contemporary Visual Art." Her work as a visual artist was included in the 1995 inaugural biennial of Site Santa Fe, and has been shown at the New York Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Post Gallery (Los Angeles), La Mama (NYC), DNJ and Thomas Jancar (Los Angeles), Manifesta (Murcia, Spain), and the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, among other venues.
Fabio Salvatti, PhD, is Associate Professor at Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil in the Performing Arts Program. He was a 2015 Visiting Scholar at NYU / Hemispheric Institute. He researches humor and activism, exploring the political potential embedded in everyday life. He is also a theater director and has worked with Kiwi Companhia de Teatro and Cia EmCômodo Teatral.
Helene Vosters is an artist, activist, and scholar. She holds a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies, and is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Canadian Consortium for Performance and Politics in the Americas.
Isaque Ribeiro (2015-2016)
Isaque Ribeiro is an actor, performer and performance student from Brazil. Since 2007 he has been researching and creating street performances, mostly using money as raw material for his pieces. He has a Master's Degree and is finishing his PhD Studies in Arts at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), with additional training at the New York University, sponsored by Capes. Since 2011, he has been Assistant Professor of Acting at the University Center Estácio de Sá.
Sérgio Andrade is an Artist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Arts of the Body at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). He holds a PhD and an MA in Philosophy from Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), an MA in Performing Arts and a BA in Dance from Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA). His research focuses on relationship between dance, philosophy, and performance. As an artist, Sérgio has worked in dance, performance art, urban intervention, and video art, in many projects in Brazil, Colombia, and USA. At UFRJ, he coordinates the Laboratory of Critics.
Leda Martins is a poet and playwright. She is a professor at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil, where she teaches courses on theatre, drama and performance, and comparative literature. Besides her essays on Brazilian theatre and drama, in the last years she has focused her research on the relationship between performance and memory, particularly in the realm of Afro-Brazilian ritual performances, mainly on the Congados ceremonies, in order to develop her conception of Spiral Time as one of the most important re-creations of African knowledge, philosophy, and world view in the Americas, particularly in Brazil.