Bios
Arthur Avilés
Arthur Avilés is an internationally renowned gay New York-Rican dancer/choreographer, born in 1963 in Jamaica, Queens, raised in Long Island and the Bronx. In December 1998, he co-founded The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (BAAD!) with Charles Rice-González. BAAD is a performance space that blazed a path for professional art and dance in the Bronx; it has garnered local and national attention for its work. Avilés has received numerous awards and honors, including an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from his alma mater, Bard College, as well as a Bronx Recognizes Its Own (BRIO) award, and multiple New York Dance and Performance (Bessie) Awards.
Ana Dopico
Ana Dopico is a comparative scholar of the Americas, Cuba, the Caribbean, and the Global South. She is Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. From 2014-2019, she was Director of the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center at NYU. Professor Dopico's essays and cultural journalism on the Cuban present have been published and translated in print media and literary journals, including The New York Times, NACLA, Al Adab (Arabic), L'Avenc (Catalan) and in the digital project Bridges to/from Cuba. In her book project, Cubanologies, Altered States of the Nation, Professor Dopico examines the "imagined disunity" of the nation revealed by 20th century Cuban culture, wherein altered political states fracture the unifying political and racial myths of cubanidad.
Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes
Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes is Professor of Spanish, American Culture, and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan. In his first book, Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), he analyzes portrayals of migration, sexual diversity, and gender nonconformity in Puerto Rican cultural productions. In his most recent book, Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance (forthcoming, University of Michigan Press, 2021), he argues that drag can serve not only to question gender and sexuality but also to explore commodification, cyberspace, diasporic displacements, ethnicity, the human/animal divide, monstrosity, politics, poverty, race, and racial passing. He has chaired and served on numerous scholarly committees and boards.
Elizabeth “Macha” Marrero
Elizabeth Marrero, an award-winning performance artist, also known as Macha, the Papi Chulo Drag King. She burst onto the club scene with her drag act in 1998. She continued her work with Arthur Avilés performing the role of Maeva in over a dozen dance pieces over the first 15 years of her career. She has been a recipient of a BRIO Award from Bronx Council on the Arts (2003) and a Tanne Foundation recipient in 2005. She has performed in Paris, Puerto Rico, Miami and NY. The Village Voice states "Ms. Marrero is inspired, if not possessed!" Her last one-woman show was in June 2019 at BAAD! and she performed to a sold out house. In April 2018 Macha hosted the NY Live Arts- Resistance & Friends, an evening of cutting edge performances. Elizabeth is currently pondering her next show and ABSOLUTELY brings realness from her life, her heart and her journey in who she is. Stay tuned…
Nikolai McKenzie Ben Rema
Nikolai McKenzie Ben Rema is a dance theater artist, writer, and storyteller, whose work is fed by their identity as a queer, multiracial, interclass, intercaste immigrant from Jamaica. Nikolai seeks the liberation of BIPOC bodies and minds through movement by inviting softness, vulnerability, weirdness, uncool, and tender surrender into their movement practice. With innate, vibrant Caribbean patriotism and queerness, Nikolai aims to cultivate community upswell through mutual support, confronting trauma, and truth-telling in performance with the notion that the body is not an apology and that memory, history, protest, pain, pleasure, and joy are all means of resistance in the face of ignorance. A fatwa in patwa.
Charles Rice-González
Charles Rice-González, born in Puerto Rico and reared in the Bronx, is a writer, long-time LGBTQ activist, and co-founder of BAAD! His novel, Chulito, received recognition from the American Library Association and the National Book Critics Circle. He has edited and been featured in nearly a dozen volumes and has received numerous awards for his writing and activism, including the Lambda Literary Foundation's Dr. Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award, an award from the New York City Council, the Men(cion) Award from 100 Hispanic Women, a Gay City News Impact Award, and a Lannan Foundation Fellowship. He is an Asst. Professor at Hostos Community College – CUNY where he teaches in the English Department.
Ramón H. Rivera-Servera
Ramón H. Rivera-Servera is Dean Designate at the College of Fine Arts at The University of Texas at Austin, where he researches 20th and 21st Century performance in North America and the Caribbean with special emphasis on race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. He is author of Performing Queer Latinidad: Dance, Sexuality, Politics (University of Michigan Press, 2012), a study of the role performance played in the development of Latina/o queer publics in the United States from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s. He is currently completing a book manuscript, Reggaetón’s Queer Turn: Sexuality, Abstraction, and Contemporary Art in the Circum-Caribbean, which pursues feminist and queer uptakes of the popular music and dance cultures of reggaetón in circum-Caribbean contemporary art to theorize the role of black aesthetics in the sexual cultural politics of the Spanish speaking Caribbean and its diaspora.
Rhina Valentin
Rhina Valentin is a Native New Yorker Afro-Boricuan embracing her Black, Indigenous, and European ancestry, as well as a leading figure in New York City’s entertainment industry. She’s a mother, comedienne, producer, director, writer and dancer. As an award-winning artist and performer, Rhina has captured audiences with her humor while discussing adversity with honesty, representing the values of working-class women-of-color. Accolades she has received include the All Inclusive Change Maker Award, a 25 Bronx Influential Women Award, a Woman of Today Award, and a Change Agent Award from Color Magazine. This year, she was named the Creative New Yorker for New York by the Citizens' Committee for NYC. She has been featured on national television, including HBO and nationally syndicated commercials. Since 2006, she has hosted the popular Open Friday talk show on BronxNet TV.