Diana Taylor (Professor, “Introduction“) is University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at New York University. She is the award-winning author of multiple books, among them: Theatre of Crisis (1991), Disappearing Acts (1997), The Archive and the Repertoire (2003), Performance (2016), and ¡Presente! The Politics of Presence (2020). These last three books were written or translated into various languages, including ¡Presente! recently published by Ediciones Universidad Alberto Hurtado. Taylor was the Founding Director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics from 1998 to 2000. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and several other major awards. In 2017, Taylor was President of the Modern Language Association. In 2018 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Science.
Fernando Bañuelos (“Theory Adrift“) is a doctoral student at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures of New York University. He obtained a B.A. in Hispanic Literature in December 2019, at the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, in Mexico. He is a member of the Seminario Amparán, a creative writing collective coordinated by Sylvia Estrada and Julián Herbert, in the city of Saltillo, and has published several reviews in the cultural magazine Replicante. His research interests include literary writing in contemporary Mexico, representations of violence in the Mexican public sphere, and infrastructural poetics.
Gabriel Carle (“Reaching and Recasting Soil through Art and Performance“) San Juan, 1993. completed a BA in Creative Writing at the UPR, Río Piedras, and an MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish at NYU. Their creative and academic research interests center on issues of Queerness, Indigeneity, and Blackness in Caribbean literature and activism. They have won various literary prizes at UPR, Río Piedras, and U. of Houston. In 2018, they published their first short story collection, Mala leche. They are currently pursuing a PhD in Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at NYU.
Bárbara Pérez Curiel (“Fragments in and on Translation“) is a Ph.D. student at New York University’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She holds a Master’s degree in Modern Languages (Spanish) from the University of Oxford (Distinction) and a Bachelor’s degree in Modern Languages (German) from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where she received the Department’s prize for the best undergraduate thesis. She has a professional background as an editor, journalist and translator, and has worked for Mexican and international media outlets and publishing houses.
Lauren Kiele DeLeon (“Language of Land“) is an MA Candidate in Performance Studies as well as an Uruguayan-American director, intimacy director, and theorist from Miami, FL. She has worked on and Off-Broadway in production and administration at theatres including The Lark, Roundabout, Manhattan Theatre Club, The Flea, and Keen Company. Lauren came to intimacy direction after multiple years in the theatre alongside working in bystander intervention and trauma and is in training with TIE and IDC (where she is completing her certification). Her theory focuses on decolonizing practices within theatre practice and administration and how intimacy work ties into it. Aside from theatre, she is interested in decolonization of land and native people within the current colonial system and how to give rights to and protect land.
Jesse Hathaway Diaz (“Towards an Apocalypti(c)orazon: The Pocho Heart in Translation“) is a Performance Studies MA Candidate at NYU with a BFA in Drama from NYU. He is an initiated priest in the Lucumí Orisha tradition, hosts an occult themed podcast called ‘Radio Free Golgotha’, and edits the ‘Folk Necromancy in Transmission’ imprint through Revelore Press. For the better part of two decades, he has been involved with Theatre Group Dzieci, a New York based experimental theatre ensemble which explores theatre and ritual as a way, blending service with self-exploration and performance. Dividing his time between the Bronx and a farm in the Hudson Valley, his artistic and written work navigate the world-as-magic through exploring orality and transmission, decolonialism, ritual theory and praxis, and herbalism and healing modalities both through study and involvement.
Cora Laszlo (“Non Linear Movements“)is a Brazilian dance-maker, teacher, and author. She holds a BA in Dance and a Licentiate degree in Dance Teaching from UNICAMP (Brazil), a specialization degree in Klauss Vianna Technique from PUC-SP (Brazil), and is a Performance Studies MA candidate at NYU. Cora has been based in New York since 2018, where she created her most recent dance solo December 32, which was performed in New York and in Brazil. She is currently a LEIMAY Arts in the Community Garden Fellow. She is the author of the book Outros Caminhos de Dança: Técnica Klauss Vianna para Adolescentes e para Adolescer (2018), on teaching the Klauss Vianna Technique for teenagers.
Victor Lozano (“Testing Perceptions- Reimagining Space & Movement“) is a MA candidate in Performance Studies and holds a BFA in Dance from the Juilliard School. He has worked extensively as a dancer and performer with artists such as Pam Tanowitz, Brian Brooks, John Heginbotham, Lar Lubovitch, Austin Diaz & Jonathan Campbell, Ryan McNamara, Brendan Fernandes, and the Merce Cunningham Trust. He is a recipient of the Juilliard Career Advancement Fellowship (2016, 2017), and the Jacob’s Pillow Ann and Weston Hicks Choreography Fellowship (2019).
Anel Rakhimzhanova (“Musicking back to land“) is a PhD student at the Performance Studies Department, NYU (MA’20). Her current research interests include decolonial epistemologies, surveillance and big data studies, movement theory and methodologies.
Miro Spinelli (“Towards an abyssal praxis in 5 moves“) is an artist and scholar currently living between Brazil and New York City. They hold a MA in Arts of the Scene from UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro – FAPERJ scholarship) and a MA in Performance Studies from NYU (Tisch School of the Arts Departmental Fellowship), where they are currently a PhD candidate (Corrigan Fellowship). They act in the entanglements between performance art, writing, visual arts and theory, with a focus on minoritarian epistemologies. Their pieces have been presented at exhibitions, festivals and conferences in several cities in Latin America, Europe and North America. Spinelli’s intellectual and artistic practices are invested in anti-colonial strategies made through a radical connection with matter, things and the invisibles that are produced in relation with and between them.