Events

Macarena Gómez-Barris is Chairperson of the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies and Director of the Global South Center at Pratt Institute, a space for critical inquiry that centers experimental modes of thinking, being, and doing. Macarena is author of three books including The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives, that theorizes social life, art, and decolonial praxis through five extractive scenes of ruinous capitalism upon Indigenous territories (Duke University Press, 2017). Macarena’s recently published book Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Americas (UC Press 2018), asks us to imagine politics beyond the nation state. She is also author of Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (2009), and co-editor with Herman Gray of Towards a Sociology of a Trace (2010).

Diana Taylor is University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at NYU, the 2017 President of the Modern Language Association. 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; ofDisappearing 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 ATHE Research Award in Theatre Practice and Pedagogy and the Modern Language Association Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for the best book in Latin American and Spanish Literatures and Culture (2004). The Archive and the Repertoire has been translated into Portuguese by Eliana Lourenço de Lima Reis (Belo Horizonte, Brazil: Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais 2012) and Spanish by Anabelle Contreras (Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Universidad Alberto Hurtado, 2015.) She published PERFORMANCE (Buenos Aires: Asuntos Impresos, 2012), a new revised version in English with Duke U.P. 2016; and Acciones de memoria: Performance, historia, y trauma, Peru: Fondo Editorial de la Asamblea Nacional de Rectores (2012). She is co-editor ofEstudios avanzados de Performance (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2011), among others. Taylor is the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005, an ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship, 2013-14. She is Vice President of the Modern Language Association (MLA) and will be President in 2017. Diana Taylor is founding Director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, funded by the Ford, Mellon, Rockefeller, Rockefeller Brothers and Henry Luce Foundations.

Martha Wilson is a pioneering gallery director, and feminist artist. In 1976, she founded Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc.—an artist-run space that champions the exploration, promotion, and preservation of artists' books, temporary installation, and performance art. As an artist, Wilson creates innovative photographic and video works that explore her female subjectivity. The New York Times art critic Holland Cotter describes her as one of "the half-dozen most important people for art in downtown Manhattan in the 1970s." Wilson has been granted fellowships for performance art from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is the recipient of a Bessie Award, Courage Award for the Arts, Obie Award, and Richard Massey Foundation-White Box Arts and Humanities Award. Wilson received an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.

Marcial Godoy-Anativia is a sociocultural anthropologist and Managing Director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at New York University (NYU). He is also Editor of the institute’s digital journal, emisférica. His publications include "Area Studies and the Decade after 9/11" (2016) with Seteney Shami, Religiones, matrimonio igualitario y aborto: Alianzas con y entre actores religiosos por los derechos sexuales y reproductivos en Argentina (2014) with Daniel Jones y Angélica Peña, Rhetorics of Insecurity: Belonging and Violence in the Neoliberal Era (2013) with Zeynep Gambetti, and Ciudades Translocales: Espacios, flujo, representación—Perspectivas desde las Américas (2005), with Rossana Reguillo. From 2000 to 2007 he served on the Science Research Council, providing support to programs on Latin America and the Caribbean and International Collaboration. He is currently a member of the Board of Directors of NACLA, the North American Congress on Latin America.

Oraison H. Larmon specializes in archiving, curating, and researching performance art collections. While working at New York University, Larmon processed archival materials for the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. They have served as the curator of the two-day event Performing the Archive (2013), the co-curator of the full-scale exhibition Desperate Archives (2014), and the curator of the performance art program for the Radical Archives Conference (2014). Larmon's work addressing the practical, theoretical, and methodological challenges of archiving performance art has been presented at The New School, Pratt Institute, and New York University, among other institutions. Their current research examines how the archival body of performance art enacts a broader historical discourse through its material, corporeal, and digital compositions. Larmon is currently a doctoral student in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Julie Tolentino is a performance artist, dancer/choreographer, and visual artist. Her art explores the intersections of queer sexual subcultures, Eastern healing practices, and HIV/AIDS cultural activism. Tolentino's solo and collaborative works have been presented at The Kitchen, Invisible Exports, New Museum, Participant Inc., Performa, San Francisco Art Institute, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Commonwealth & Council, The Broad Museum, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and Wexner Center, among other venues. Tolentino was a founding member of ACT UP New York's House of Color Video Collective and the legendary Clit Club—a nightclub in New York City that promoted safe-sex for multiracial lesbians. She co-wrote the Lesbian AIDS Project's Women's Safer Sex Handbook, co-edited the TDR: The Drama Review's Provocations section, and served as the editor of Guard Your Daughters: Clit Club 1990–2002 (forthcoming). Tolentino works in New York City.

Thomas J. Lax is associate curator of Media and Performance Art at MoMA, where he has organized exhibitions, performances, and publications including Steffani Jemison: Promise Machine, Greater New York 2015, Maria Hassabi: PLASTIC, Projects 102: Neïl Beloufa, and Modern Dance: Ralph Lemon. He worked on a rehang of MoMA’s contemporary collection display across media in 2017, and more recently, an exhibition about the New York-based group of dancers, musicians, and artists who comprised the Judson Dance Theater in the 1960s.

Hentyle Yapp is an artist and assistant professor at New York University in the Department of Art & Public Policy. He is affiliated faculty with the Disability Council, Asian/Pacific/American Institute, and the Department of Performance Studies. His articles have appeared or are forthcoming in GLQ, American Quarterly, Journal of Visual Culture, and Verge: Studies in Global Asias. He is also a member of the Social Text collective. He received his BA from Brown University, JD from UCLA School of Law with specializations in Critical Race Theory and Public Interest Law, and a PhD from UC Berkeley in Performance Studies.

DANCENOISE is a dance-based performance art group created by Anne Iobst and Lucy Sexton. Since 1983, they have performed throughout New York City nightclubs and theaters including the W.O.W. Café Theatre, Pyramid Club, 8BC, PS122, Franklin Furnace, The Kitchen, and Lincoln Center. The group hosted a weekly cabaret during the 1980s at King Tut's Wah Wah Hut in the East Village. DANCENOISE has performed, taught, and toured at the Phenomenon Festival (Jerusalem), Queer Up North (Manchester), Vienna Fest Wochen (Vienna), Mayfest (Glasgow), New York Live (Osaka), and numerous squatted houses across Europe. The group received a Bessie Award in 1989 for their performance All the Rage at PS122. In 2015, DANCENOISE exhibited a week-long retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Chelsea.