Performance artist/writer Guillermo Gómez-Peña 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.

Gómez-Peña'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 Hemisférico (Lima, Rio de Janeiro, and NYC) and the Habana Bienale.

Among numerous fellowships and prizes, Gómez-Peña 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, Gómez-Peña 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, Gómez-Peña 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, Gómez-Peña 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, Gómez-Peña 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.

www.pochanostra.com