About the Faculty

Jill Lane
Jill Lane (jill.lane@nyu.edu) is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University, where she teaches courses on performance in the Americas, in relation to the histories of colonialism, neocolonialism, and globalization. Her book, Blackface Cuba, 1840-1898 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005) examines racial impersonation, national desire, and anticolonial sentiment in Cuba. She is presently editing an anthology on Latin American performance with Routledge, and is co-editor with Peggy Phelan of The Ends of Performance (New York University Press, 1998).

Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani
Peru’s most important theatre collective, Grupo Cultural Yuyachkan has been working since 1971 at the forefront of theatrical experimentation, political performance, and collective creation. “Yuyachkani” is a Quechua word that means "I am thinking, I am remembering"; under this name, the theatre group has devoted itself to the collective exploration of embodied social memory, particularly in relation to questions of ethnicity, violence, and memory in Peru. Their work has been among the most important in Latin America’s so called “New Popular Theatre,” with a strong commitment to grass-roots community issues, mobilization, and advocacy. Yuyachkani won Peru’s National Human Rights Award in 2000. Known for its creative embrace of both indigenous performance forms as well as cosmopolitan theatrical forms, Yuyachkani offers insight into Peruvian and Latin American theatre, and to broader issues of postcolonial social aesthetics.

Mila Aponte-González
Teaching Assistant Mila Aponte-González is an ABD in Performance Studies at NYU. She received her B.A. with honors in both Theatre and Comparative Literature from the University of Puerto Rico (2002) and her M.A. in Performance Studies from NYU (2004). Her research interests include Latin American experimental theater, collaborative creation, performing objects, the performance of translation, embodied activism, dramaturgy, and the interplay between memory and performance. She is currently working on a dissertation that looks at the collaborative theater projects of Puerto Rican artists Rosa Luisa Márquez and Antonio Martorell and Ecuadorian Grupo de Teatro Malayerba, in order to develop a methodology for the dramaturgical analysis of process-based collaborative performance. Mila is a curator/archivist for the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, and a researcher with the Escuela Internacional de Teatro de América Latina y el Caribe (EITALC). She is also a performer in her own right, linking theatre, music, dance, masks and objects in her pieces, which have been recently seen in San Juan, New York and Barcelona."