Latinx Artist Fellowship
Guillermo Gómez-Peña
Performance Artist and Writer
San Francisco, CA and Mexico City, Mexico
My work is rooted in a multidimensional approach: I am a performance, video and installation artist, a pedagogue, poet, journalist and cultural theorist who explores cross-cultural issues, immigration, the politics of language, the human body, and new technologies from a Latino/border perspective. My artwork and books mix experimental aesthetics and activist politics, imagination and social reality, Spanglish, and Chicanx humor to engage audience members. I collaborate with performers, photographers, choreographers, musicians and videographers and utilize audience interaction as an artistic strategy to illustrate multiple perspectives across national borders, race, gender and generations. My projects involve acts of citizen diplomacy and strategies to create communities of “rebel artists” devoted to erasing the borders between art and politics, practice and theory, artist and spectator. I firmly believe the role of the artist is to actively engage citizens in the larger debates of our times.
Guillermo Gómez-Peña is a performance artist, writer, activist, radical pedagogue and artistic director of the performance troupe La Pocha Nostra. Born in Mexico City, he moved to the US in 1978, and since 1995, his three homes have been San Francisco, Mexico City and the “road.”
His performance work and 21 books have contributed to the debates on cultural, generational, and gender diversity, border culture and North-South relations. His artwork has been presented at over one thousand venues across the US, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Russia, South Africa and Australia. A MacArthur Fellow, USA Artists Fellow, and a Bessie, Guggenheim, and American Book Award recipient, he is a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines in the US, Mexico, and Europe and a contributing editor to The Drama Review (NYU-MIT), the Venice Performance Art Week Journal, and emisférica, the publication of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics (NYU). Gómez-Peña is currently a Patron for the London-based Live Art Development Agency, and a Senior Fellow in the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics.