Marlène Ramírez-Cancio
Associate Director, Arts & Media

Marlène Ramírez-Cancio is an interdisciplinary artist from Puerto Rico who co-founded and co-directs Fulana, a Latina video collective based in New York City. Using parody and satire as a critical tool, Fulana’s mock television commercials, music videos and print pieces respond to the ways ideologies and identities are marketed through the mass media. She is currently Associate Director of Arts & Media at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, a multilingual, collaborative network of institutions, artists, scholars, activists and cultural creators from throughout the Americas who work at the intersection of art, scholarship and social change. Focusing on embodied practice—performance—and housed at New York University, the Institute promotes vibrant collaborations at the level of expressive practice and pedagogy, builds collections of artistic and academic materials for research and teaching across borders, and aims to develop the next generation of multidisciplinary scholars and performance-based artists. She heads up projects such as the Encuentros, week-long gatherings that bring together hundreds of participants to think and create together; the Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library, an online archive of rare video documenting political performance in the Americas; EMERGENYC, a program for emerging performers in New York City focused on “artivist” (artist/activist) work; the Hemispheric New York Performance Network, an initiative funded by the Rockefeller Foundation's NYC Cultural Innovation Fund to provide creative support for politically engaged local artists; and the HELIX Queer Performance Network, a collaboration between La MaMa, BAX, and Hemi that seeks to nurture emerging queer performers, unite diverse communities, and celebrate the legacy of queer performance in NYC. In 2014, she received the BAX Honorary Artist Advocate Award for her work in the field. Her academic background is in Comparative Literature, having earned her BA in Literature at Harvard University, and her MA and PhD coursework (ABD) in Comparative Literature at Stanford University. During her time in California, Marlène studied with Cherríe Moraga, performed with the San Francisco Mime Troupe and the Red Rocket Theater, and was a member of the Latina Theatre Lab, a collective of writers, performers, and directors whose work dealt with Latina identities, pop culture, and the intricacies of belonging. In 2010, she received her MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish at New York University's Department of Spanish and Portuguese.