LA POCHA NOSTRA BIOS

GUILLERMO GMEZ-PEA

Performance artist/writer Guillermo Gmez-Pea resides in San

Francisco where he is artistic director of Pocha Nostra. Born in 1955
and raised in Mexico City, he came to the US in 1978. His pioneering
work in performance, video, radio, installation, poetry, journalism, and
cultural theory, explores cross-cultural issues, immigration, the politics
of language, "extreme culture" and new technologies. A MacArthur
fellow and American Book Award recipient, he is a regular contributor
to National Public Radio, a writer for newspapers and magazines in the
U.S. and Mexico, and a contributing editor to The Drama Review (NYU-
MIT).

He has recently produced an artist-made DVD featuring performance

and video art of his own work and the work of over 30 of his
international collaborators. Designed for screenings, video
installations, intelligent TV and as a pedagogic tool, DVD vol 1.,
"Ethno-Techno: Los Video Graffitis" is available through La Pocha.

Gmez-Pea's performance, installation and video work has been

presented at over seven hundred venues across the U.S., Canada,
Mexico, Europe, Australia, Russia, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Brazil,
Peru, Venezuela and Argentina (see below). Most recently, he has
presented work at Tate Modern (London), the House of World Cultures
(Berlin), MACBA (Barcelona), The Chopo Museum (Mexico City), the
Encuentro Hemisfrico (Lima, Rio de Janeiro, and NYC) and the
Habana Bienale.

Among numerous fellowships and prizes, Gmez-Pea was a recipient

of the Prix de la Parole at the 1989 International Theatre Festival of
the Americas (Montreal), the 1989 New York Bessie Award, and the
Los Angeles Music Center's 1993 Viva Los Artistas Award. In 1991,
Gmez-Pea became the first Chicano/Mexicano artist to receive a
MacArthur Fellowship. In 1995, he was included in The UTNE Reader's
"List of 100 Visionaries." In 1997 he received the American Book
Award for his book New World Border. In 2000, he received the
Cineaste Lifetime Achievement award from the Taos Talking Pictures
Film Festival

Chronicles, essays and scripts of his large-scale projects can be found

in his books:
Mexterminator (Editorial Oceano, 2002)
Dangerous Border Crossers (Routledge, 2000)
Codex Spangliensis (City Lights, 2000)
Mexican Beasts and Living Santos (PowerHouse, 1997)
The New World Border (City Lights, 1996)
Warrior for Gringostroika (Graywolf, 1994)

The film version of his solo performance Border Brujo (in collaboration
with Isaac Artenstein), was awarded first prize in the 1991 National
Latino Film and Video Festival and first prize in the category of
"Performance Film" at Cine Festival (San Antonio 1991). His videos,
El Naftazteca: Cyber Aztec TV for 2000 AD and Temple of
Confessions were awarded first prizes at Cine Festival in San Antonio,
Texas in 1996 and 1998 respectively. In 2001, his film
Borderstasis was awarded the prize for "best performance video"
from the Vancouver Video Poetry Festival. His work was recently
featured in the HBO special Americanos. His videos are distributed by
Video Data Bank (Chicago).

For twenty years, Gmez-Pea has been exploring intercultural issues

with the use of mixed genres and experimental languages. Continually
developing multi-centric narratives and large-scale performance
projects from a border perspective, Gmez-Pea creates what critics
have termed "Chicano cyber-punk performances," and "ethno-techno
art." In his work, cultural borders have moved to the center while the
alleged mainstream is pushed to the margins and treated as exotic and
unfamiliar, placing the audience members in the position of
"foreigners" or "minorities."

He mixes English and Spanish, fact and fiction, social reality and pop
culture, Chicano humor and activist politics to create a "total
experience" for the viewer/reader/audience member. These strategies
can be found in his live performance work, his radio chronicles, his
award-winning video art pieces, and his books. Through his
organization La Pocha Nostra, Gmez-Pea has focused very intensely
in the notion of collaboration across national borders, race, gender and
generation as an act of citizen diplomacy and as a means to create
"ephemeral communities" of rebel artists.

Gmez-Pea's experimental radio works have received the following

honors: Border Notebooks won the Silver Award in
Performance/Spoken Word Category from the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting in 1991. We Don't Speak English Only, Vato was
awarded first prize by the National Association of Community Radios in
1993. Menage-Trade received the Golden Reel Award in 1995. A
collection of his audio work entitled Borderless Radio was released on
compact disk by Toronto's Word of Mouth in 1995.

Apocalypse Maana, his latest audio CD was recently published by

Calaca Press, and is available through La Pocha Nostra.

International Festivals and Biennials that have featured his work

include:
-The International Theatre Festival of the Americas. Montreal 1988
-The Demons of Los Angeles. France, Spain, Sweden 1989
-The 1989 Bienal de la Habana, The Decade Show, New York 1990
-Time Festival. Gante, Belgium 1990
-EDGE '90. Newcastle, England, 1990
-The Los Angeles Festival. Los Angeles 1990 and 1993
-The Next Wave Festival. Brooklyn Academy of Music New York 1991
-The Festival of the Worlds. Finland 1991
-EDGE '92. Madrid, London 1992
-The Sydney Biennial. Australia 1992
-The Whitney Biennial, New York 1993
-Fundaci\u243\'97n Banco Patricios. Buenos Aires, 1993
-Festival Rompeforma, Puerto Rico 1993
-The Hamburg Theatre Festival. Germany, 1993
-LIFT. London 1993 and 1995
-Banff Centre, Canada 1994
-3er Festival de Performance. Mexico City 1994
-Ante-America. Colombia, Dominican Republic, Mexico, the US 1994
-Helsinki Act, Finland 1995
-X-Teresa Museum, Mexico City 1995
-Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC 1996
-5Cyberconf. Madrid 1996
-Polverigi Theatre Festival. Italy 1996
-Szene Festival. Salzburg, Austria 1996
-ARS Electronica. Lintz, Austria 1997
-Root/less Festival. Hull, England 1997
-Inroads, Arts International. Miami 1998
-Caribe 2000. San Juan Puerto Rico, 1999
-Sonart. Barcelona, Spain 1999
-Diaspora. Oviedo, Spain, 1999
-Eventa 5, Sweden 2000
-Encontro Hemisferico. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 2000
-International Theater Festival, Havana, Cuba 2001
-EXPERIENCIES: Barcelona Art Report, Spain 2001
-Ayuntamiento de la Gran Canaria, Canary Islands 2001
-Performance Space, Sydney, Australia 2001
-Espacio C, Santandar, Spain, 2001
-Muffat Halle, Munich, Germany, 2001}{\fs28
-Encuentro Hemisf\u233\'8erico. Lima Peru, 2002
-Liverpool Biennale. 2002
-House of World Cultures, Berlin, 2002
-Tate Modern, London, 2003
-Museo de El Chopo, Mexico City, 2003
-Performance Space, Sydney, Australia, 2003
-Center for Performance Research, Wales, 2003
-Zuerher Theatre Spektakle, Switzerland, 2003
-Detox Festival, Norway, 2004

MAIN PERFORMANCE COLLABORATORS

MICHLE CEBALLOS

Michle Ceballos is an accomplished artistic director, educator,

choreographer, performance artist and dancer. Her dance performance
history includes numerous international ballet companies. Ceballos
danced professionally in Colombia, England, Germany, Russia, and
throughout South America and the United States. Born in New York,
Ceballos began studying ballet at the age of six in Bogota, Colombia
under the exiled dancer Vladimir Volski of the Bolshoi Ballet. She
continued her studies in New York City at Thalia Mara's National
Academy of Ballet and Theatre Arts, the School of American Ballet, the
American Ballet Theatre School and the Joffrey Ballet School. She
joined the Royal Ballet School in London at sixteen, where she spent
two years studying under the sponsorship of Margot Fonteyn and
toured with the Sadlers Wells Royal Ballet.

In 1990, Ceballos founded Opendance, (OD) an intergenerational

dance theatre company that performs in established theatrical venues
as well as in community settings. OD conducts educational programs
for children throughout Arizona. For the last 10 years, Ceballos has
been collaborating with Guillermo Gmez-Pea and La Pocha Nostra,
performing in venues and festivals around the world.

VIOLETA LUNA

Violeta Luna obtained her graduate degree in Acting from the Centro
Universitario de Teatro in 1995 and Casa del Teatro in Mexico City in
1998. She has performed under the direction of relevant Mexican
artists including Jos Caballero, Ral Zermeo, Jos Ramn Enrquez,
Alicia Martnez lvarez and Estela Leero.

In 1995, Luna founded Grande y Pequeo (Big and Small) an all-

women theater company that focuses on developing original works and
experimental stagings of classical theater. Violeta has toured her work
extensively throughout Mexico and has performed and taught
workshops in Cuba, Argentina, Peru, Brazil, Spain, France, Portugal,
Norway, Egypt and the USA. She works in community centered
projects in Mexico, and with incarcerated and recently arrived
immigrant women in San Francisco.

Since 1998, Violeta has been an associate artist of La Pocha Nostra, a

San Francisco-based interdisciplinary performance collective under the
direction of Guillermo Gomez Pea. In San Francisco, she is the
associate director of El Teatro Jornalero!, a theater company that
brings the voice of Latin American immigrant workers to the stage, and
the performance collective Secos & Mojados. Her current work
explores the relationship between theater, performance and
community engagement.

ROBERTO SIFUENTES

Roberto Sifuentes is an interdisciplinary performance. His work fuses

highly charged cultural issues with a wild pop culture aesthetic. From
homeland security to extreme reality television from video games to
military training from fetishism to evangelism Sifuentes creates
interactive performance installations where characters wind their way
through psycho/sexual/political/ universes. The result is a cinematic
style that uses satire humor and spectacle to peel away the viewers
protective layers and reveal societys desires, fears and obsessions.

Sifuentes work combines live performance with interactive

technologies and video as a presentation medium. His most recent
projects include: performance installations "Undermining the Machine,"
2001, and "14 UnNatural Acts a collaboration with Lian Sifuentes.
Versions of 14UNNatural Acts have been performed at Trinity College
(Hartford), The Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics
(NYU), The Lab (San Francisco), and the Enteractive Language Festival
(Portland, OR).
14 UnNatural Acts premiered in New York City presented by
Performance Space 122 and Arts Internationals Mexico Now Festival.
Upcoming work includes The Hearing Trumpet a new multimedia
performance inspired by the surrealist novel by Lenora Carrington.
Created in collaboration with writer/dramaturge Pricilla Page and
media artist Rene Garcia. Project will premier in early 2009.

A founding member of La Pocha Nostra, Sifuentes has collaborated and

performed with Guillermo Gmez-Pea throughout the United States,
Europe and Latin America. Projects with La Pocha Include: The New
Barbarians Collection Fall 07 X-teme Fashion show and Human
Auction (Arnolfini, 2007), Divino Corpo (NRLA, 2008) The
Mapa/Corpo Series: Interactive rituals for the new millennium (2005-
2008), The Mexterminator Project (1997-2001), BORDERscape 2000
(1998-99), The Temple of Confessions (an interactive
performance/installation which opened at the Corcoran Gallery in
October 1996), El Naftazteca: Cyber-Aztec TV for 2000 AD (an
interactive performance art television special which was broadcast to
over 6 million homes in 1995), and The Dangerous Border Game (an
experimental Spanglish opera). Sifuentes co-authored Temple of
Confessions: Mexican Beasts and Living Santos with Gmez-Pea in
1997.

From 2001-2006, Sifuentes was in residence at LaMaMa ETC in New

York as Artistic Director and Lecturer of The Trinity College/La MaMa
Performing Arts Program NYC. He recently completed a residency as
the 2008 Elena Diaz-Verson Amos Eminent Scholar in Latin American
Studies at Columbus State University, Georgia.

DANI D'EMILIA

Dani d'Emilia is a cross-disciplinary Italo-Brazilian artist working

in both solo and collaborative projects. Her practice primarily roots
itself in live and mediated performance, whilst encompassing an
expansive range of forms and media such as performance for video,
video installation, interactive/site-based/durational performance, flash
mobs, sculpture and photography. She is particularly interested in
liminality within performance and its destabilizing potential.

d'Emilia was part of The Solvents Performance Collective (2004-2007)

and has recently founded Living Structures, a motor that instigates
collaborations between artists from different creative fields in order to
generate immersive performance events in environments of activated
installation. Her work has been shown internationally (Brazil, Germany,
Italy, Poland, Slovakia, Spain, Portugal and UK).