Guillermo Gómez-Peña

450Guillermo Gómez-Peña was born in Mexico City and moved to the US in 1978, where he established himself as a performance artist, writer, activist, and educator. He has pioneered multiple media, including performance art, experimental radio, video, performance photography and installation art. His eight books include essays, experimental poetry and chronicles in both English, Spanish and Spanglish.

Most of his artistic and intellectual work concerns the interface between North and South (Mexico and the U.S.), border culture and the politics of the brown body. His original interdisciplinary arts projects and books explore borders, physical, cultural and otherwise, between his two countries and between the mainstream U.S. and the various Latino cultures: the U.S.-Mexico border itself, immigration, cross-cultural and hybrid identities, and the confrontation and misunderstandings between cultures, languages and races. His artwork and literature also explore the politics of language, the side effects of globalization, “extreme culture” and new technologies from a Latino perspective.  He is a patron of the London-based Live Art Development Agency.  Gómez-Peña received both his B.A. (1981) and M.A. (1983) from California Institute of the Arts. He studied Linguistics and Latin American Literature at the UNAM (1974–1978, Mexico City).

Douglas Kearney

KearneyPhoto_CreditEric_PlattnerDouglas Kearney is a poet/performer/librettist. Cultural critic Greg Tate remarked that Kearney’s National Poetry Series selection, The Black Automaton (Fence Books, 2009), “flows from a consideration of urban speech, negro spontaneity and book learning.” Crescent City, a hyperopera composed by Anne LeBaron, premiered in Los Angeles in 2012. A Cave Canem fellow, he has received a Whiting Writers Award, a Coat Hanger award, MAP Fund grants and several fellowships. Kearney teaches in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts, but has also lectured in the Music and Theater schools. Red Hen Press will publish Patter in 2014.

Franco Berardi Bifo

Bifo

Born in Bologna, Italy in 1949, Franco Berardi Bifo is a writer, media-theorist, and media-activist. As a young militant he took part in the experience of Potere operaio in the years 1967-19073, then he founded the magazine A/traverso (1975–81) and was part of the staff of Radio Alice, the first free pirate radio station in Italy (1976–78).

Involved in the political movement of Autonomia in Italy during the 1970s, he fled to Paris, where he worked with Félix Guattari in the field of schizoanalysis.

He has been involved in many media-projects, like Telestreet, and Recombinant.org.

Bifo published the books Poetry and finance (1912) After the future (2011) The Soul at Work (2010), Felix (2001), Cibernauti (1994), Mutazione e Cyberpunk (1993) and contributed to the magazines Semiotext(e), Chimères, Metropoli, and Musica 80.

He is currently collaborating with e-flux journal.

Coordinator of the European School for Social Imagination (SCEPSI), he has been teaching at Ashkal Alwan in Beirouth, PEI-Macba in Barcelona, Accademia di Brera in Milano, and has been lecturing in social centers and Universities worldwide.