Infrastructure

The Hemispheric Institute website houses a vast collection of materials related to performance and politics in the Americas, including online archives with hundreds of hours of streaming video; innovative digital publications (HemiPress), trilingual artist profiles, interviews, course dossiers, and more.

  • Gatherings

    Encuentros are itinerant, biennial gatherings of hundreds of artists, scholars, and activists from across the Americas to collaborate, share work, and engage in dialogue and experimentation through a program of lectures, performances, roundtables, work groups, exhibitions, and workshops.

  • Publications

    HemiPress is the Hemispheric Institute’s digital publications imprint, created to house and centralize our diverse publication initiatives. Using a variety of customized open-source digital humanities platforms, HemiPress includes the Gesture short works series, the Duke U.P./HemiPress digital books, stand-alone essays, and the Institute’s peer-reviewed journal emisférica, alongside interviews, Cuadernos, and other online teaching resources.

  • Local Events

    Housed at NYU, Hemi New York is a hub for artistic and scholarly exchange. Hemi New York hosts year-round public programming, including lectures, conferences, performances, exhibitions, artist residencies, and a visiting scholars program. Core initiatives include EMERGENYC, our training program for emerging artivists; the Critical Tactics Lab, a forum for researching contemporary and historical collective action; and Hemispheric Dialogues, a series of informal conversations on issues such as Indigeneities, Disabilities, and Trans-feminisms.

  • Courses

    Our interdisciplinary courses, offered in different locations in the Americas, combine the face-to-face quality of traditional classrooms with immersive site visits and online collaboration. Taught by leading scholars and artists and open to students from throughout the Hemi network, our intensive courses have been held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico; Bogotá, Colombia; and Lima, Peru.

  • Membership

    Hemi is animated by its member institutions. Each organization contributes its local knowledge to create a network far more powerful than any single entity. In addition to participating in the vision and practice of Hemi, member institutions gain enhanced access to Hemi’s digital authoring tools, online archives, and other pedagogical resources. Faculty and students also have opportunities to propose work groups, participate in graduate-level courses, and engage with an active, Americas-wide network to address pressing social issues.

  • Video Library

    Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library (HIDVL) is the first major online video archive of performance in the Americas, created in collaboration with NYU Libraries and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This growing repository guarantees historical preservation and free online access to more than 900 hours of streaming video through the Hemi website. Each collection includes a trilingual profile that contextualizes the work.

  • Work Groups

    Work groups facilitate long-term and collaborative research between scholars, artists, and activists. These groups are interdisciplinary and focus on themes such as Performing Disability/Enabling Performance, Performance Practice as Research, Women Mobilizing Memory, Performing the Asian/Americas, The Street and the Network: Activism in the 21st Century, and Carnival and Popular Fiestas.

  • Physical Library

    Housed in the Tamiment Library at NYU, our physical archive includes fragile materials such as slides, photographs, books, posters, and other performance ephemera, as well as collections of important artists and activists like Jesusa Rodríguez (Mexico) and the Yes Men (US). Archives at Risk, the collection of materials housed in NYU’s Special Collections at Bobst, preserves work on performance and politics that cannot—or will not—be protected in their countries of origin in the Americas.We also maintain a collection of rare books, journals, and videos at our offices in New York.