Performance artist/writer Guillermo Gómez-Peña resides in San Francisco where he is artistic director of La Pocha Nostra. For 25 years, Gómez-Peña has been exploring intercultural issues and border culture 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." These strategies can be found in his live performance work, his award-winning video art pieces, his installations, his radio commentaries, and his eight books. Among his fellowships and prizes, Gómez-Peña was 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, and in 1995, he was included in the UTNE Reader’s "List of 100 Visionaries." In 1997 he received the American Book Award for New World Border.
