Guillermo Gómez-Peña

Guillermo Gómez-Peña is a Chicano performance artist, writer, activist, and educator. Gómez-Peña has created work in multiple media, including performance art, experimental radio, video, photography and installation art. His ten books include essays, experimental poetry, performance scripts and chronicles in both English, Spanish and Spanglish. He is a founding member of the art collective Border Arts Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo and director of the performance art troupe La Pocha Nostra.

Gómez-Peña has contributed to cultural debates for nearly 30 years staging seminal performance art pieces including "The Couple in the Cage" (with Coco Fusco, 1992-93), “The Crucifiction Project” (with Roberto Sifuentes, 1994), “Temple of Confessions” (1995), “The Mexterminator Project” (1997–99),The Living Museum of Fetishized Identities, (1999-2002), the “Mapa/Corpo” series (2004-2009), Corpo Ilicito (2010-2011) and most recently Corpo Insurrecto (2012-2013). His performance work mixes experimental aesthetics, activist politics, Spanglish humor and audience participation to create a "total experience" for the audience member/reader/viewer.

Guillermo Gómez-Peña was born in Mexico City in 1955. He studied Linguistics and Latin American Literature at National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) from 1974–1978. He moved to the US in 1978 and studied at California Institute of the Arts, earning a B.A. in 1981 and an M.A. in 1983.

From 1983 until 1990, Gómez-Peña lived in the San Diego/Tijuana border region. Most of his artistic and intellectual work concerns the interface between North and South (Mexico and the U.S.), border culture and the politics of the brown body. His original interdisciplinary arts projects and books explore borders, physical, cultural and otherwise, between his two countries and between the mainstream U.S. and the various Latino cultures: the U.S.-Mexico border itself, immigration, cross-cultural and hybrid identities, and the confrontation and misunderstandings between cultures, languages and races. Gómez-Peña was a founding member of Border Arts Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo, an international arts collective based at the Centro Cultural de la Raza in San Diego.

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