Guillermo Gómez-Peña is a Mexican/Chicano performance artist, writer, activist, and educator. Gómez-Peña has created work in multiple media, including performance art, experimental radio, video, photography and installation art. His fifteen books include essays, experimental poetry, performance scripts, photographs and chronicles in both English, Spanish and Spanglish. He is a founding member of the pioneering art collective Border Arts Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo (1985-1992) and artistic director of the performance art troupe La Pocha Nostra.
José Esteban Muñoz was a Cuban American academic in the fields of performance studies, visual culture, queer theory, cultural studies, and critical theory. His first book, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999) examines the performance, activism, and survival of queer people of color through the optics of performance studies. His second book, Cruising Utopia: the Then and There of Queer Futurity, was published by NYU Press in 2009. Muñoz was Professor in, and former Chair of, the Department of Performance Studies at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Muñoz was the recipient of the Duke Endowment Fellowship (1989) and the Penn State University Fellowship (1997). He was also affiliated with the Modern Language Association, American Studies Association, and the College Art Association.
Suzanne Lacy is an American artist, educator, writer, and professor at the USC Roski School of Art and Design. She has worked in a variety of media, including installation, video, performance, public art, photography, and art books, in which she focuses on "social themes and urban issues." She served in the education cabinet of Jerry Brown, then mayor of Oakland, California, and as arts commissioner for the city. She designed multiple educational programs beginning with her role as performance faculty at the Feminist Studio Workshop at the Woman's Building in Los Angeles.
The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) is a multi-venue arts center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, which opened on October 3, 2008. The building is named after Curtis Priem, co-founder of NVIDIA and graduate of the RPI Class of 1982, who donated $40 million to the Institute in 2004.
Tania Bruguera is a Cuban artist and activist who focuses on installation and performance art. She lives in Cambridge where she works as head of media and performance at Harvard University. Bruguera has participated in numerous international exhibitions. her work is in the permanent collections of many institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art and Bronx Museum of the Arts and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana.
Coco Fusco is a Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curator whose work has been exhibited and published internationally. Fusco's work explores gender, identity, race, and power through performance, video, interactive installations, and critical writing.
Jesusa Rodríguez is a Mexican theater director, actress, performance artist, social activist, elected Senator of the Morena party and an active promoter of the use of marihuana and other drugs. Active representative of the LGBT community.
Day Without Art (DWA) is an annual event where art institutions and other organizations organize programs to raise awareness of AIDS, remember people who have died, and inspire positive action. Initiated in 1988 by VisualAIDS from New York City (NYC), nowadays a global event.
Luis Alfaro is a Chicano performance artist, writer, theater director, and social activist.
Alina Troyano, more commonly known as Carmelita Tropicana, is a Cuban-American stage and film lesbian actress who lives and works in New York City.
Live Art Development Agency, known by its acronym LADA, is an arts organisation and registered charity founded in London in 1999 by Lois Keidan and Catherine Ugwu. LADA provides professional advice for artists as well as producing events and publications intended to enhance the understanding of and access to Live Art. They are an Arts Council England's National Portfolio Organisations. In 2021 Lois Keidan stood down as director, and Barak adé Soleil and Chinasa Vivian Ezugha were appointed as joint co-directors.
Leandro Soto was a Cuban-American multidisciplinary visual/installation and performance artist. He was also a set and costume designer for theater and film. Soto studied at Escuela Nacional de Arte National Art Schools (Cuba) and Instituto Superior de Arte, University of Havana. As an educator he taught and lectured at various Higher Education institutions in the U.S. and abroad. Soto also founded a creative workshop, El Tesoro de Tamulte, in Tabasco, Mexico, from which professional artists emerged.
Dara Greenwald (1971–2012) was an interdisciplinary artist with a PhD in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, an MFA in writing from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, and a BA in Women's Studies from Oberlin College. Her collaborative work involved video, writing, public art, activism and cultural organizing.
Maris Bustamante is a Mexican interdisciplinary artist. She has presented her work in 21 solo exhibitions and over 400 group shows in Mexico and internationally. She has conceived, written, produced and executed more than 250 performances, installations, environments and two big “contraespectáculos” (anti-shows). Busta has also presented performance art pieces through television broadcasts, which she called "social performances" involving the non-arts public. She also designs sets, costumes, and props for theatre, television, and cinema. Bustamante is a respected teacher and for more than thirty years has been a professor at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana de la Unidad Azcapotzalco. Since the 1990s she has maintained a robust career as a researcher and writer on themes related to conceptual art, performance, and participation. Her writing has appeared in seminal books and exhibition catalogues, including Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (2000), Arte [no es] Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960–2000 (2008)', and Asco: Elite of the Obscure, 1972–1987(2011).
The Anonymous Was A Woman Award is a grant program for women artists who are over 40 years of age, in part to counter sexism in the art world. It began in 1996 in direct response to the National Endowment for the Arts' decision to stop funding individual artists.
The Couple in a Cage: Two Amerindians Visit the West was a 1992–93 performance art piece by artists Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña for their exhibition The Year of the White Bear and Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West which toured five countries and was performed in nine different locations. First performed in honor of the quincentenary anniversary of Christopher Columbus' arrival to the Americas, the work sought to make visible the history of abuse, captivity and exploitation of indigenous peoples. Their inspiration drew heavily upon the history of othering, the human zoo, and life stories of historical figures such as Ota Benga and Sarah Baartman—beginning with the kidnapping of Arawak Indian by Columbus and his men to be displayed in the Spanish Court.
Antonieta Sosa is a Venezuelan performance artist born in New York. Her notable performance works include Conversación con agua tibia and Del Cuerpo al Vacío. Her early work includes abstract art pieces such as Visual Chess (1965), which is in the Museum of Modern Art's online collection.
Kambui Olujimi is a New York-based visual artist working across disciplines using installation, photography, performance, tapestry, works on paper, video, large sculptures and painting. His artwork reflects on public discourse, mythology, historical narrative, social practices, exchange, mediated cultures, resilience and autonomy.
Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, is an American interdisciplinary artist of Puerto Rican descent born in The Bronx, NY and based in Orlando, FL.
OCDChinatown is a contemporary space for sound, image, object, movement and thought, located in New York City in the Chinatown neighborhood of Manhattan. It was established in 2018 by Liutas van Hook.
