Diana Taylor is University Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at NYU.  She is the author of Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America (1991), which won the Best Book Award given by New England Council on Latin American Studies and Honorable Mention in the Joe E. Callaway Prize for the Best Book on Drama, of Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's 'Dirty War', Duke U.P., 1997, and The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Duke U.P., 2003) which won the Outstanding Book award from the Association of Theatre in Higher Education, and the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize from the Modern Language Association.  She is co-editor of: PMLA’s special issue on WAR, published October 2009, Stages of Conflict: A Reader in Latin American Theatre and Performance (Michigan U. P.), Holy Terrors: Latin American Women Perform (Duke U.P., 2004), Defiant Acts/Actos Desafiantes: Four Plays by Diana Raznovich, Bucknell U. P., 2002, Negotiating Performance in Latin/o America: Gender, Sexuality and Theatricality, Duke U.P., 1994, and The Politics of Motherhood: Activists from Left to Right, University Press of New England, 1997, and editor of five volumes of critical essays on Latin American, Latino, and Spanish playwrights.  Her articles on Latin American and Latino performance have appeared in The Drama Review, Theatre Journal, Performing Arts Journal, Latin American Theatre Review, Estreno, Gestos, Signs, MLQ and other scholarly journals. She has also been invited to participate in discussions on the role of new technologies in the arts and humanities in important conferences and commissions in the Americas (i.e. ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure). She is the recipient of numerous awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005-6. Diana Taylor is founding Director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, funded by foundations such as Ford, Rockefeller, Mellon, the Henry Luce Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

Jesusa Rodríguez is Mexico’s most influential cabaret and political performance artist, and recipient of an Obie Award. Often referred to as a chameleon, Rodríguez moves seemingly effortlessly and with vigor across the spectrum of cultural forms, styles, and tones. Her work challenges traditional classification, crossing with ease generic boundaries: from elite to popular to mass, from Greek tragedy to cabaret, from pre-Columbian indigenous to opera, from revue, sketch and carpa, to performative acts within political projects. She ran the famous El Hábito in Mexico City with her partner, Liliana Felipe, where they staged hundreds of shows over the course of fifteen years. Most recently, she heads up the Resistencia Creativa movement in Mexico, whose key strategy is using "massive cabaret" as a tool for political action.

Lorie Novak is an artist and Professor of Photography and Imaging at NYU Tisch School of Arts. Her photographs, installations, and Internet projects have been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions including ones at ArtSway, Hampshire, England; The International Center of Photography, NY; Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ,; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art, NY; The Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Jewish Museum, NY; among others. She has been the recipient of NEA & NYFA Fellowships, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, and residencies at the Bogliasco Foundation, Italy; Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center, Italy; MacDowell Colony; Yaddo,; Djerassi Foundation, and ArtSway (England). Her photographs are in numerous permanent collections including the Art Institute of Chicago; Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ; Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, NY; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Novak's ongoing Collected Visions project, exploring how family photographs shape our memory was one of the earliest interactive storytelling sites when it launched in 1996. She also initiated and co-directs the Photography & Imaging department’s community collaboration program, www.photoandimaging.net/coco, where P&I students teach photography and digital imaging to NYC high school students, and is Chair of the Visual Arts Steering Committee at NYU. See www.lorienovak.com for more information.