C. Daniel Dawson has worked as a photographer, filmmaker, curator, arts administrator, consultant and scholar. He has served as Curator of Photography, Film and Video at the Studio Museum in Harlem (NYC), Director of Special Projects at the Caribbean Cultural Center (NYC) and Curatorial Consultant and Director of Education at the Museum for African Art (NYC). As a photographer, he has shown in over 25 exhibitions. Prof. Dawson has also been associated with many prize-winning films including "Head and Heart" by James Mannas and "Capoeiras of Brazil" by Warrington Hudlin.

Carlos Monsiváis is a prominent essayist, satirist, and novelist living in Mexico City. Mr. Monsivais has contributed to Mexican journals such as, Excelsior, Siempre, and Nexos and he currently writes for La Jornada as well as El Financiero. He is the author of more than a dozen books in Spanish, both fiction and nonfiction, including "Amor Perdido," "Días de Guardar," "A Ustedes les Consta," "Nuevo Catecismo Para Indios Remisos," and "Escenas de Pudor y Liviandad." "Mexican Postcards" is the title of a volume of his essays in English.

Elvira and Hortencia Colorado, Chichimec Otomi storytellers, playwrights, performers and community activists are founding members of Coatlicue Theatre Company (coatlicue.com). They are also members of danza Mexica Cetiliztli, New York Zapatistas and the American Indian Community House. The company's plays address social, political, cultural and identity issues that impact their lives and their community. Their work is based on stories they weave together which educate as well as entertain, while reaffirming their survival as urban Native American women. They have conducted storytelling/theater workshops. They are recipients of the Ingrid Washinawatok Community Activism Award.

East Coast Artists is a professional theatre company performing new plays and classics in new interpretations. ECA also conducts training workshops. Founded in 1991 by Richard Schechner, ECA has produced "Faust/gastronome," "Amerika" (after Kafka), Chekhov's "Three Sisters," and "YokastaS." The first is combines original writing by Schechner with texts of Marlowe and Goethe (performed in German and English) with elements of Gounod's "Faust." "Amerika" is Maria Vail's adaptation of Kafka's. "Three Sisters" is a brand new translation by ECA member Michelle Minnick. "YokastaS" is co-authored by Schechner and Saviana Stanescu. ECA emphasizes a long developmental workshop and rehearsal process, open rehearsals, and continuous revision throughout the life of a production. The goal of ECA is to tell stories in an emotionally full and intellectually challenging way; to engage the historical and political forces operating in our epoch; to serve as a model of humanistic, small-scale interaction and social process; to train young and developing artists; and to entertain and, in the broadest sense, educate audiences.

Elizabeth McAlister is Assistant Professor of Religion and Latin American Studies at Wesleyan University. Her research focuses on Afro-Haitian religious culture and transnational migration. She is the author of "Rara! Vodou, Power and Performance in Haiti and its Diaspora." She produced the audio CD called "Rhythms of Rapture: Sacred Musics of Haitian Vodou" on Smithsonian Folkways.

FOMMA (Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya) is a Mexican organization in Chiapas whose mission is to empower Mayan women through bilingual literacy courses (in Tzotzil and Tzeltal), workshops in productive skills, health education, and theater.

Gustavo Buntinx is an art historian, critic and independent curator, and director of the Cultural Center of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (Peru). A graduate of Harvard University, where he studied Literature and History, he completed postgraduate studies at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. He has been professor in Art Criticism History, Latin American Art, and 20th. Century Art at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and the Universidade do São Paulo. In Lima he directed the Italian Art Museum and the Art and History Universidad de San Marcos Museum. He has been curator of more than a dozen exhibits in Perú, Uruguay and México. His essays are published in art criticism anthologies released in Europe and the US.

Jean Franco is the winner of the PEN 1996 award for lifetime contribution to the dissemination of Latin American literature in English and has been recognized by the Chilean and Venezuelan governments for advanced scholarship on Latin American literature in the United States. She has served as president of the Latin American Studies Association in Great Britain and of the Latin American Studies Association in the US. She is currently Professor Emeritus at Columbia University. Her most recent books include: "Critical Passions: Selected Essays," edited by Mary Louise Pratt and Kathleen Newman (1999) and "The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City. Latin America and the Cold War" (2002).

Jill Greenhalgh (www.magdalenaproject.org) is a performance artist and director from Wales, UK. She is also the Founder and Artistic Director of The Magdalena Project, an International Network of Women in Contemporary Theatre. Since 2002, she has held a full time Lectureship in Performance Studies, University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

Joseph Roach is Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of Theater and English at Yale University. Roach has chaired the Department of Performing Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre at Northwestern University, and the Department of Performance Studies at NYU. His books and articles include "Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance" (Columbia, 1996), which won the James Russell Lowell Prize from MLA and the Calloway Prize from NYU, ?The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting? (Michigan, 1993), which won the Barnard Hewitt Award in Theatre History, and essays in Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, The Drama Review, Theatre History Studies, Discourse, Theater, Text and Performance Quarterly, and others.

Josh Kun is Assistant Professor of English at UC Riverside, and an arts columnist for the San Francisco Bay Guardian and The Boston Phoenix. He is a 2000-2002 Sundance Writers Fellow whose writing has appeared in the popular press, scholarly journals, and book anthologies. He is the host of two Latin music video and culture shows (The Red Zone on MTV-Español and Rokamole on KJLA) and is a resident DJ with the US-UK-Latin America nightclub La Leche. He is currently completing his first book for UC Press, "Strangers Among Sounds: Listening, Difference, and the Music of America."

Leda Martins is a Poet and a Professor of Dramatic Arts and Literature at UFMG and at the Graduate Arts program at FALE/UFMG. In 2000, she completed a Post-Doctorate in Performance Theories at New York University. In 1991, she finished her doctorate in Comparative Literature at UFMG and, in 1981, the Master of Arts at Indiana University. She is the author of several books and has published essays and poems in the United States, France and England and also several papers and articles in Brazil. Among her books we can highlight: "O moderno teatro de Corpo santo," UFMG Publishers/1991; "A cena em sombras," Perspectiva Publishers/1995; "Afrografias da memória," Perspectiva Publishers/1997; "Dias Anônimos," Sette Letras Publishers/1999. Currently, she is preparing "Performances do tempo espiralar," to be published this year.

Luis Millones is an outstanding anthropologist and historian of the Andean Cultures and author of numerous works on those themes, he currently studies the condition of "being Native" in Peru. For doing so, he works from a historical perspective, since without knowledge of what happened in the past, present is beyond understanding. The relationship among ethnic groups, and, in general, the effects of the genocide that the European occupation of America brought about are similar in other parts of the continent but, as for South America, it was particularly intense in Peru, due to the role that the original civilization in that country had, not only among the Incas but also among other groups who used to hold the hegemony before the Incas.

Mike Brookes (www.mikebrookes.com) is an artist, and designer. Born in the north of England, where he lived and studied until moving to South Wales to further his training in the early eighties. Here he continued to develop a studio based practice centred around his activities as a painter; while developing an engagement with performance and time based media, and a connection with the possibilities of experimental theater through contact and involvement with the contemporary performance practice of companies such as Cardiff Laboratory Theatre, Moving Being and Brith Gof. By the end of the eighties he was based within the, then internationally renowned, theater department of Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff. And over the subsequent ten years worked and collaborated extensively within contemporary theater, in Wales and abroad, acquiring a wide spread reputation for his activities as both a stage and lighting designer. In recent years his work has focused largely upon the production of durational objects and interventions, holistic ambients, radical structures of presentation, and context specific performance works. Concentrating both artistically and practically upon the proposal and development of innovative practices and strategies within the form, function, and placement of live art. Producing notable and influential works at a range of scales, within an international arena. Most significant, perhaps, being those actions and pieces produced within the ongoing collaboration of Pearson/Brookes: "dead men's shoes" (1997), "the first five miles" (1998), "the man who ate his boots" (1998), "body of evidence" (1998), "just a little bit of history repeating" (1999), "but it will turn out wrong" (2000), "like a pelican in the wilderness" (2000), "carrying Lyn" (2001), "polis" (2001), "rain dogs" (2002), and "who are you looking at" (2004). These works have provoked the use and integration of elements as diverse as photography, sampling, large scale and multiple projection, short-range and satellite radio broadcast technology, mobile telecommunications, helicopters, cars, trains, surveillance camera and monitoring equipment, and the employment of software led tools within creation and control. In 2007 he was appointed Creative Research Fellow within the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Most recently, he has returned to the studio to focus on the long-term development of a new series gallery works.

Nao Bustamante (www.naobustamante.com) is an internationally known performance art pioneer originating from the San Joaquin Valley of California. She received her BFA and MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in the field of New Genres. Her work encompasses performance art, installation, video, pop music and experimental rips in time. Some of Her collaborators include Coco Fusco, D.L. Alvarez, and Chico MacMurtrie. Bustamante's work has been presented, among other sites at, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Arts, and the Kiasma Museum of Helsinki. She has performed in Galleries, Museums, Universities and underground sites throughout Asia, Africa, Europe, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Mexico and of course the United States. Most recently she received the prestigious Anonymous Was a Woman fellowship and a residency to develop an interactive web site through the Franklin Furnace in New York. Using the body as a source of image, narrative and emotion, Nao's performances communicate on the level of subconscious language taking the spectator on a bizarre journey, with haunting images, cracking stereotypes by embodying them.

Reverend Billy is a performer based in New York, United States. Director of the Church of Stop Shopping (www.reverendbilly.org), a radical performance community that uses the styles of fundamentalist televangelism and works within the tradition of The Civil Rights Movement, The Liberation priesthood of Latin America and ACT-UP.

Silvia Spitta is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Dartmouth College. Her field of interest ranges from contemporary and colonial Latina/o American writers, theories of transculturation, and narratives of mestizaje or miscegenation. Author of "Between Two Waters: Literary Transculturation in Latin America," Spitta is currently working on a book titled "Theories of Colonialism in/of the Americas" and on a project concerning the mestizo in Latin American and Latino narratives.

The Peruvian vocalist who became internationally renowned with "Maria Lando," a track in the 1995 David-Byrne-produced CD The Soul of Black Peru, has often been compared to Cesaria Evora, from Cabo Verde. It's not surprising; both women have found rich material in folk traditions of their countries, and both sing songs that are rooted in gloomy emotions: pain, nostalgia, longing. Susana Baca (www.luakabop.com/susana_baca) is not only one of the greatest divas in South America, she is a tireless researcher, and is largely responsible for the revival of many forms of Afro-Peruvian folklore. She is also the founder of the "Centro Experimental de Música Negrocontinuo" (Institute of the Black Continuum), a cultural center dedicated to the study of Afro-Peruvian music and dance. Won a GRAMMY AWARD in 2002.

Sylvia Molloy, Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at New York University, is one of the most influential scholars of Latin American literature and culture. She is also a prestigious fiction writer. Her novel "En Breve Cárcel" (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1981) has been translated into English and Portuguese. She recently finished a new novel "El Común Olvido." She has been the recipient of numerous honors: Presidency of the Modern Language Language Association, the Doctorate of Humane Letters, Tulane University, the Achievement Award for Outstanding Service to La Herencia Latina and the Latino Community, the N.E.H Fellowship and the Guggenheim Fellowship.

Vivian Martínez Tabares is a Cuban critic, researcher, editor and professor. She has published Teatro por el Gran Octubre, José Sanchis Sinisterra: Explorar las Vías del Texto Dramático, y Didascalias Urgentes de una Espectadora Interesada. Her work has been compiled in theatre anthologies, and she has collaborated in specialized publications in the Americas and Europe. She is a professor at the Instituto Superior de Arte, and has lectured in several universities in Latin America and Europe. She received the "Caribe 2000" Rockefeller Foundation fellowship at Universidad de Puerto Rico. Martínez Tabares is director of Conjunto magazine, and head of the Theatre Department of Casa de las Américas, Cuba, where she organizes the Theatrical May Season.