Guillermo Gómes-Peña



Guillermo Gómez-Peña was born in Mexico City in 1955. He studied at the Facultad de Filosofia y Letras, were he was influenced by the Mexican student movement and counterculture and became involved in what he called "interdisciplinary troublemaking".
A desire to "embrace the Chicano experience" brought him California in 1978, starting him on a journey of bicultural reflection. He studied post-studio art at the California Institute of Arts In Los Angeles.
In 1981 he and choreographer Sara-Jo Berman founded Poyesis Genetica performance troupe, whose style was a mix of Mexican carpa (urban popular theatre)magical realism,kabuki, and U.S.multimedia. Poyesis moved to the San Diego/Tijuana border in 1983 and eventually faded into the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo, started in 1985. The BAW/TAF declared the border region to be an "intellectual laboratory" and staged performance pieces right on the border.
Aside from his performance art, Gómez-Peña wrote extensively for both American and Mexican newspapers and in 1986 co-founded a bilingual/experimental magazine called The Broken Line/La Linea Quebrada. He has been a contributing editor to High Performance magazine and The Drama Review, two of the leading magazines dealing with performance art.
He has also done a number of radio shows including "Border Dialogues", "The Territory of Art" and "Crossroads". His performances have taken him throughout the country, most notably to the Smithsonian Institution, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Art Institute of Chicago.
From 1989 to 1995 he collaborated in many projects with Coco Fusco and, since 1994, with Roberto Sifuentes on, among others, the "Mexterminator Project".
In 1991 he was the recipient of the prestigious John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship.

See also: Marcela C. Musgrove (http://www4.ncsu.edu/eos/users/m/mcmusgro/public/ggpindex.html)


Sendungen im ORF-Kunstradio:

30. 4. 1992: "1992"



BIOGRAPHIES