Guillermo Gómez-Peña / Balitronica Gomez
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.
Balitronica Gomez is a performance artist, cyborg poet, and queer sex radical raised on the Tijuana/San Diego border. She studied Literature at San Diego State University and then moved to a 17th century Dominican convent in Paris. Currently living between San Francisco and Mexico City, she recently earned her MFA in Poetry and Queer Theory at Mills College. Since 2013 she has been collaborating with Guillermo Gomez-Peña and La Pocha Nostra and has developed photo-performance projects with Manuel Vason, Herani Hache, and Marcos Raya. She is currently touring with Gomez-Peña and as a member of the International performance art troupe La Pocha Nostra.