Guillermo Gómez-Peña is a performance artist, writer, activist, radical pedagogue, and director of the performance troupe La Pocha Nostra. Born in Mexico City, he moved to the US in 1978. His performance work and 11 books have contributed to the debates on cultural & gender diversity, border culture and US-Mexico relations. His artwork has been presented at over nine hundred venues across the US, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Russia, South Africa and Australia. A MacArthur Fellow, Bessie and American Book Award winner, he is a regular contributor for newspapers and magazines in the US, Mexico, and Europe and a contributing editor to The Drama Review (NYU-MIT). Gómez-Peña is a Senior Fellow in the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, a Patron for the London-based Live Art Development Agency and in 2012 he was named Samuel Hoi Fellow by USA Artists.
Postcommodity is an interdisciplinary arts collective comprised of Raven Chacon, Cristóbal Martínez, and Kade L. Twist. Postcommodity’s art functions as a shared Indigenous lens and voice to engage the assaultive manifestations of the global market and its supporting institutions, public perceptions, beliefs, and individual actions that comprise the ever-expanding, multinational, multiracial and multiethnic colonizing force that is defining the 21st Century through ever increasing velocities and complex forms of violence. Postcommodity works to forge new metaphors capable of rationalizing our shared experiences within this increasingly challenging contemporary environment; promote a constructive discourse that challenges the social, political and economic processes that are destabilizing communities and geographies; and connect Indigenous narratives of cultural self-determination with the broader public sphere. Postcommodity are the recipients of grants from the American Composers Forum (2008), Arizona Commission on the Arts (2009), Joan Mitchell Foundation (2010), Creative Capital (2012), Art Matters (2013), and the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation (2014). The collective has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including: Contour the 5th Biennial of the Moving Image in Mechelen, Belgium; Nuit Blanche, Toronto, CA; 18th Biennale of Sydney in Sydney, Australia; Adelaide International in Adelaide, Australia; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Scottsdale, AZ; and their historic land art installation Repellent Fence at the U.S./Mexico border near Douglas, AZ and Agua Prieta, SON.
Reed Adair Bobroff (Diné) is a poet, playwright, and performer from Albuquerque, NM. He has shared his work in print in the Breakbeat Poets Anthology and on stage at the Nuyorican Poets Café, the National Museum of the American Indian, and on HBO’s Brave New Voices. In 2016, he was the winner of the Yale Young Native Storytellers Playwriting Award for his play, A Fraction of Love. He graduated from Yale University with a degree in Theater Studies and now works at the Yale Child Study Center researching the healing quality of writing in Native communities and those struggling with addiction.
Ty Defoe (Giizhig), is a Grammy Award winner from the Oneida and Ojibwe Nations and resides in NYC. He is a writer and shape-shifting interdisciplinary artist who has gained recognition in many circles around the world and in his community. He brings the teachings of his mentors with him as a practitioner of hoop dancing, eagle dancing, and a carrier of traditional songs. Ty is this year’s Jonathan Larson Award winner (w/ his main collaborator Tidtaya Sinutoke) for book, lyrics, and music on their collection of new musical theater works. He was awarded a New England Foundation for the Arts, American Masterpieces grant for his cultural and artistic legacy on: Drum is Thunder, Flute is the Windunder the direction of Kevin Locke. Most recently, Ty was co-writer and co-creator of Heather Henson’s Crane on Earth, in Sky with Ibex Puppetry (La MaMa, NYC & Lied Center for the Performing Arts in Nebraska). Other works include: Clouds Are Pillows for the Moon (w/ composer Tidtaya Sinutoke), (Yale Institute for Musical Theatre, ASCAP Musical Theatre Workshop with Stephan Schwartz, 2015 Kilroy’s honorable mention list), Tick-Tick (Prospect Theatre’s Musical Theatre Lab), In the Cards (Boston Contempo-International Festival), Crossing Borders (CAP 21 Residency), Red Pine (Autry Native Voices Theater Festival, Institute of American Indian Arts). Concerts: Joe’s Pub, Songbook at Lincoln Center, Symphony Space, 54 Below, Goodspeed Opera House, Dramatist Guild National Conference, NAMT Songwriters Cabaret, and the Johnny Mercer Songwriting project.
Projects in development: Hart Island Requiem (with The Civilians/R&D Group),
Sunrise Prayer (with collaborators Mary Kathryn Nagle and Tidtaya Sinutoke at Goodspeed Opera), and Gender Nation (Robert Rauschenberg Residency).
In his free time, he mentors Indigenous Artists' at the Alaskan Cultural Heritage Center and Hawaiian Theatre Initiative through his co-owned company, Indigenous Direction (w/ Larissa FastHorse). Ty is a guest artist and lecturer at Central Michigan University and Institute of American Indian Arts. He’s on the facilitation team for artEquity, a Theater Communications Group equity, diversity, and inclusion fellow alum, a Dramatist Guild, ASCAP, and East Coast Two Spirit Society member. Degrees from CalArts, Goddard, and NYU's Tisch and made a guest appearance on Netflix show, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt as Young Anthony Black Elk. Ty draws inspiration from his favorite color, clear and blue. He lives in NYC.
Represented by Alaina Feehan at ATB | He/Him | tydefoe.com
Rhiana Yazzie (Diné) is a playwright, screenwriter, producer, director, and actor based in Minnesota. She is a Playwrights’ Center McKnight Playwriting Fellow this year (2016/2017). She is also a two-time Playwrights’ Center Jerome Fellow (2010/2011 and 2006/2007) and was a Playwrights’ Center Core Member for three years. This fall she will be in residence at the MacDowell Colony where she’ll be working on her next two screenplays. Her most recent projects include a play commission from the William Inge Center and a joint commission from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the Public Theater. She’s also written plays for young audiences which include Chile Pod (La Jolla Playhouse); Wild Horses (Bonderman National Theatre for Youth Symposium and The Kennedy Center’s New Visions/New Voices).
She created her theatre company, New Native Theatre, in 2009, a new way of looking at, thinking about, and staging Native American stories, newnativetheatre.org. She holds a Masters of Professional Writing from the University of Southern California where she produced lectures and concerts by Madeleine Albright, Herbie Hancock, Spaulding Grey, and Stephen Hawking among others.
Gloria Miguel (Kuna/Rappahannock) studied drama at Oberlin College and is a founding member of Spiderwoman Theater. She is an actor, playwright, and educator. With Spiderwoman Theater, she has toured throughout Europe, Australia, New Zealand and performed in Beijing, China at the 4th World Woman’s Conference. She received an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from Miami University and is a lifetime member of the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute. Selected acting credits include a US tour of Hanay Geiogamah’s Grandma; Pelaija Patchnose in Tomson Highway’s The Rez Sisters; Coyote/Ritalinc in Jessica in Edmonton, AB-nominated for a Sterling Award for Best Supporting Actress; Chocolate Woman Dreams the Milky Way in Toronto with her daughter, Monique Mojica and the Spanish film Caotica Ana in Madrid, Spain.
She was a visiting professor of drama at Brandon University in Canada; drama consultant for the Minnesota Native American AIDS Taskforce, and has taught drama workshops at the Navajo Nation Reservation. Her one woman show, Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue was most recently performed at the Weesageechak Begins to Dance Festival in Toronto.
