—FACULTY—
george emilio sánchez developed EmergeNYC’s original curriculum and has been the Flagship program’s lead instructor since its inception in 2008. In 2020, Marlène RamĂrez-Cancio joined as a co-facilitator of the virtual program, and Nicolás Dumit EstĂ©vez Raful Espejo joined her in 2022. Over the years, guest faculty and presenters have included the artists, activists, and scholars below.
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2050 Lagacy, Guest Faculty 2013
2050 Legacy, Invited Artist Faculty (2013) 2050 Legacy is hip-hop and social justice theater group devoted to continuing the great work of the New WORLD Theater’s Project 2050 in empowering artists and strengthening communities through animating democracy. Aisha Jordan is a performer and arts organizer currently working with the group.

Aaron Landsman, Guest Faculty 2018
Aaron Landsman, Invited Artist Faculty (2018) Aaron Landsman makes live performances involving people, space, time and language. Based in New York City, his projects range from monologues and stage plays to participatory and conceptual works presented in places where people perform their lives: offices, homes, meeting rooms and buses. Recent

Abigail Levine, Guest Faculty 2021
Abigail Levine, Invited Artist Faculty (2021) Abigail Levine is an artist working between New York and Los Angeles. Rooted in dance but moving across media—performance, text, drawing, sound—Levine focuses on the poetics of our bodies’ work, how we record and value it. Her ongoing series, Restagings, has been supported by a

Alicia Grullón, Guest Faculty 2018–19
Alicia Grullón, Invited Artist Faculty (2018–19, 2022) Alicia Grullón is a LatinX artist from and based in the Bronx. Grullón’s works have been shown in numerous group exhibitions including The 8th Floor, Bronx Museum of the Arts, BRIC House for Arts and Media, School of Visual Arts, El Museo del Barrio,

Andrés Senra, Guest Faculty 2022
Andrés Senra, Invited Artist Faculty (2022) Andrés Senra is a multimedia artivist working in Spain, Berlin and New York. His latest works present the individual and the communities as ephemeral assemblages, in which political, economic and social tensions in the contemporary world are cast and somatised. In recent works, he has addressed issues such as

Andy Bichlbaum (Jacques Servin), Guest Faculty 2012
Andy Bichlbaum (Jacques Servin), Invited Artist Faculty (2012) Andy Bichlbaum  (AKA Jacques Servin) began his current adulthood by inserting a swarm of kissing men to a shoot-’em-up video game just before it shipped to store shelves. Finding himself fired and momentarily famous, he opted to go into weird activism. Since then,

Ann Pellegrini, Guest Faculty 2015
Ann Pellegrini, Invited Scholar Faculty (2015) Ann Pellegrini is a Professor of Performance Studies and Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. Her books and articles traverse several disciplines and interdisciplines, but one through-line is an abiding interest in exploring how feelings are lived, experienced, and communicated between and across bodies—and

Anna Deavere Smith, Guest Faculty 2008–09
Anna Deavere Smith, Invited Artist Faculty (2008–09) Anna Deavere Smith is an actress and playwright who is said to have created a new form of theatre. In a popular culture as an actress—Nurse Jackie, Blackish, Madame Secretary, The West Wing, The American President, Rachel Getting Married, Philadelphia, others. Books: Letters

Avram Finkelstein, Guest Faculty 2018–18
Avram Finkelstein, Invited Artist Faculty (2016–18) Avram Finkelstein is an artist and writer living in Brooklyn. His work has shown at The Whitney Museum, The Cooper Hewitt Museum, Kunsthalle Wien and Exit Art and is in the permanent collections of MoMA, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum,

Benjamin Lundberg Torres Sanchez, 2012 (and Guest Faculty, 2013)
Benjamin Lundberg Torres Sánchez, 2012 (and Invited Alumni Faculty, 2013) Benjamin Lundberg Torres Sánchez (b. 1987, Bogotá) (they/them/elle) uses their art to transform individual witness into collective action. As a person who was separated from their first family for 28 years through a private, transnational adoption process, they co-create spaces

Carmelita Tropicana, Guest Faculty 2008–09
Carmelita Tropicana, Invited Artist Faculty (2008–09) Cuban-born writer/performance artist Carmelita Tropicana received an Obie award in 1999 for “Sustained Excellence” and was named “One of the Most Notable Women of 1998” by El Diario newspaper. She and director Ela Troyano won Best Short at the 1994 Berlin Film Festival for

Craig Peterson, Guest Faculty 2011 (and Institutional Partner 2018–present)
Craig Peterson, Invited Artist Faculty (2011) and Institutional Partner (2018–present) Craig T. Peterson is the Artistic Director of Abrons Arts Center, joined the staff at Abrons in September 2016. Previously he was the Director of Programs at Gibney Dance, a multi-faceted center for dance and performance development, training, and presentation

D’Lo, Guest Faculty 2002
D’Lo, Invited Artist Faculty (2012) D’Lo is a queer Tamil Sri L.A.nkan-American, political theatre artist/writer, director, comedian and music producer. D’Lo has performed and/or facilitated performance and writing workshops extensively (US, Canada, UK, Germany, Sri Lanka and India). D’Lo is also the creator of the “Coming Out, Coming Home” writing

Dahlia Li, 2021; Guest Faculty 2023
Dahlia Li, 2021; Guest Faculty 2023 Dahlia Li (she/her) is an artist and writer currently completing a PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in the Department of English with certificates from the Programs in Cinema and Media Studies and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. Her dissertation, Caress without Body: Stranded Affect,

Dan Fishback, Guest Faculty 2012–14
Dan Fishback, Invited Artist Faculty (2012–14) Dan Fishback is a playwright, musician, and founding director of the Helix Queer Performance Network. His musical “The Material World” was called one of the Top Ten Plays of 2012 by Time Out New York. His play “You Will Experience Silence” was called “sassier

Daniel Alexander Jones, Guest Faculty 2013–14
Daniel Alexander Jones, Invited Artist Faculty (2013–14) Daniel Alexander Jones makes live art. An award-winning performer, writer, and director, American Theatre Magazine named him “one of fifteen artists whose work will be transforming American stages for decades to come.” His unconventional body of work includes plays (Bel Canto, Earthbirths, Phoenix

Debra Levine, Guest Faculty 2012–15
Debra Levine, Invited Scholar Faculty (2012–15) Debra Levine received her Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University and her MFA in Theatre from Columbia University. Her current research interests focus on translocal imaginaries in transnational and global performance, trans-disciplinary performance, disability arts and culture, social practice art and digital

Diana Taylor, Guest Faculty 2009–13
Diana Taylor, Invited Scholar Faculty (2009–13) Diana Taylor is a 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), and Performance (2016). Her

Dulce PinzĂłn, Guest Faculty 2009
Dulce PinzĂłn, Invited Artist Faculty (2009) Dulce PinzĂłn was born in Mexico City in 1974. She studied Mass Media Communications at the Universidad de Las Americas in Puebla Mexico and Photography at Indiana University in Pennsylvania. In 1995 she moved to New York where she studied at The International Center

Ebony Noelle Golden, Guest Faculty 2013–2019, 2021
Ebony Noelle Golden, Invited Artist Faculty (2013–19, 2021) Ebony Noelle Golden is an artist, scholar, and culture strategist from Houston, TX and now living and working in Harlem. She stages site-specific rituals and lives art performances that profoundly explore the complexities of freedom in the time of now. She serves

Ed Woodham, Guest Faculty 2013–2019
Ed Woodham, Invited Artist Faculty (2013–19) Ed Woodham has been active in community art, education, and civic interventions across media and culture for over twenty-five years. A visual and performance artist, puppeteer, and curator, Woodham employs humor, irony, subtle detournement, and a striking visual style in order to encourage greater

ERRO Grupo, Guest Faculty 2013
ERRO Grupo, Invited Artist Faculty (2013) ERRO Grupo was founded in 2001 in Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, Brasil. The group’s artistic practice explores the construction of situations in public space, the union of artistic languages, and the dilution of art in everyday life. With its situational praxis, ERRO intervenes daily flows,

Favianna Rodriguez, Guest Faculty 2013
Favianna Rodriguez, Invited Artist Faculty (2013) Favianna RodrĂguez is a transnational interdisciplinary artist and cultural organizer on a mission to create profound and lasting social change in the world. Her art and collaborative projects address migration, global politics, economic injustice, patriarchy, and sexual freedom. Favianna lectures globally on the power

Fulana, Guest Faculty 2009–2019
Fulana, Invited Artist Faculty (2009-2019) Fulana is a media collective that was founded in 2000 by four New York-based Latina artists joined by a love of video and satire, a critical gaze, a bilingual sense of humor, and a shared desire to create collaboratively. Focusing on popular culture, and using

George Emilio Sánchez, Lead Instructor and Performance Director
george emilio sánchez, Director of Performance and Pedagogy george emilio sánchez has been EmergeNYC’s Director of Performance and Pedagogy, as well as the Flagship program’s lead instructor, since its inception in 2008. He is a writer, performance artist and social justice activist. He was born in Los Angeles, raised in

Gina Athena Ulysse, Guest Faculty 2023-Virtual
Gina Athena Ulysse, Invited Artist Faculty (2023-Virtual) Gina Athena Ulysse is a self-described PostZoraInterventionist. A Haitian-American feminist artist-anthropologist, she is currently Professor of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz. In the two decades, her work as a cultural anthropologist has engaged in crossings and dialogues between the arts, humanities, and

Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Guest Faculty 2008–10, 2016
Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Invited Artist Faculty (2008–10, 2016) Performance artist/writer Guillermo Gómez-Peña resides in San Francisco where he is the artistic director of La Pocha Nostra. Born in 1955 and raised in Mexico City, he traveled to the U.S. in 1978 to study Post-Studio Art at Cal Arts. His pioneering work

Iván Monforte, Guest Faculty 2022
Iván Monforte, Invited Artist Faculty (2022) Iván Monforte (he/they) is a New York City-based artist who uses conceptual strategies to explore themes of race, class, gender, stigma, and the pursuit of love. Their work often complicates the lines between art, activism, and lived experience through social sculptures, performance, video, photography,

Janani Balasubramanian Laia Guest Faculty 2021
Laia, Invited Artist Faculty (2021) Laia is a multimedia artist, working across installation, image, live and immersive performance, emerging media, poetry, and prose. Laia’s practice aims to bring insights from contemporary science into useable, playful, divine, and mythic places in everyday life. Laia is an artist-in-residence in the brown dwarf

Jeca RodrĂguez-ColĂłn, 2013 (and Guest Faculty 2015–16)
Jeca RodrĂguez ColĂłn, 2013 (and Invited Alumni Faculty 2015–16) Jeca RodrĂguez ColĂłn (she/her) is a Puerto Rican multi-disciplinary artist and a scholar living in New York City. She holds a PhD in Philosophy, Aesthetics and Art Theory from IDSVA. Through her academic and creative work, she questions the societal prescription

Jennifer Miller, Guest Faculty 2016
Jennifer Miller, Invited Artist Faculty (2016) Jennifer Miller is a playwright, performer and the director and founder of Circus Amok. She has been working with alternative circus forms, theater, and dance, and for over twenty years. She is the recipient of the 2008 Ethyl Eichelberger Award. Her work with Circus

Karen Finley, Guest Faculty 2008–09, 2019–23
Karen Finley, Invited Artist Faculty (2008–09, 2019–23) Karen Finley is a New York-based artist whose raw and transgressive performances have long provoked controversy and debate. She has appeared and exhibited internationally her visual art, performances, and plays. Her performances have been presented at Lincoln Center, New York City, The Guthrie,

Karina Casiano, Guest Faculty 2010
Karina Casiano, Invited Artist Faculty (2010) Karina Casiano is a graduate of the University of Puerto Rico, she has worked in theater in New York, Spain and South America. In 1999, Casiano premiered her first one-woman show, Qué me trajiste: Cabaret Boricua. In 2000, she presented her second solo show,

Karina Claudio-Betancourt, 2009 (and Guest Faculty 2010)
Karina Claudio-Betancourt, 2009 (and Invited Alumni Faculty, 2010) Karina Claudio Betancourt is a Program Officer with the Open Society Foundations, where she is the project director for OSF’s Puerto Rico Project. She is a skilled community organizer with several years of management, advocacy, policy analysis, fundraising and grant writing experience.

Kirya Traber, 2012 (and Guest Faculty, 2014)
Kirya Traber, 2012 (and Invited Alumni Faculty, 2014) Kirya Traber is a nationally awarded playwright, actress, and cultural worker. She is the lead Community Artist in Residence with Lincoln Center Education. Her latest work, If This Be Sin, a musical about the gender-bending Harlem Renaissance performer, Gladys Bentley, will be

LeĂłnidas MartĂn, Guest Faculty 2010
LeĂłnidas MartĂn, Invited Artist Faculty (2010) LeĂłnidas MartĂn is a Professor at Barcelona University where he teaches New Media and Political Art. For many years he has been developing collective projects between art and activism, some of them well known internationally (Las Agencias, Yomango, PrĂŞt a RĂ©volter). He writes about

Lorie Novak, Guest Faculty 2009
Lorie Novak, Invited Artist Faculty (2009) Lorie Novak’s photographs, installations, and internet projects have been in numerous exhibitions including solo exhibitions at The International Center for Photography, NY; Photoville, Brooklyn, NY; ArtSway, Hampshire, England; Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Houston Center for

Marinieves Alba, Guest Faculty 2023
Marinieves Alba, Invited Artist Faculty (2023) Marinieves Alba is a cultural worker, educator, writer, and activist born and raised in New York City. She has worked in the international NGO and non-profit sector for over two decades, specializing in issues related to racial and cultural equity in the arts, education,

Marlène RamĂrez-Cancio, Founding Director
Marlène RamĂrez-Cancio, Founding Director & Artist Faculty (2008–present) Marlène RamĂrez-Cancio is a Puerto Rican cultural producer, artist, and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. As Artistic Director of BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange, a multigenerational arts organization nurturing creative expression and artistic process, she creates spaces of inquiry and praxis for artist-led

Martha Wilson, Guest Faculty 2011
Martha Wilson, Invited Artist Faculty (2011) Martha Wilson (b. 1947) is a pioneering feminist artist and gallery director, who over the past four decades created innovative photographic and video works that explore her female subjectivity through role-playing, costume transformations, and “invasions” of other people’s personae. She began making these videos

Mary Notari, 2011 (and Guest Faculty, 2014)
Mary Notari, 2011 (and Invited Alumni Faculty, 2014) I am a multidisciplinary theater artist, cultural activist, and dork. I firmly believe in live art and non-violent direct action as sites of world-making, radical empathy, and resistance. I have presented solo physical theater work and cabaret and I have appeared as

Marya Warshaw, Guest Faculty 2011
Marya Warshaw, Invited Artist Faculty (2011) Warshaw is the Founding Executive/Artistic Director of BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange, an organization she led for nearly thirty years. During that time, she oversaw its wide slate of programming, strategy, and development. She has been awarded the John Dewey Public Service Award from Bard College,

Maura Nguyen Donohue, Guest Faculty 2019 & 2021-23
maura nguyễn donohue, Invited Artist Faculty (2019, 2021–23) maura nguyễn donohue (she/her) is the Director of the MFA in Dance at Hunter College. From 1995-2005, her troupe, inmixedcompany was produced regularly in NYC and toured across North America, Europe and Asia. maura co-produces the Estrogenius Festival and has curated and

Nadia Granados, Guest Faculty 2023
Nadia Granados, Invited Artist Faculty (2023) Nadia Granados is a Colombian artist using performance, experimental cinema, music, multimedia, web art and cabaret. She is known as La Fulminante. Her artistic practice questions the manipulative strategies that exist behind the representational systems that circulate through the media, making a direct criticism

nia love, Guest Faculty 2022
nia love, Invited Artist Faculty (2022) nia love a Black, indigenous, American woman, dancer, choreographer, diver, and mother, whose practice is anchored and immersed in maternal care, alchemy of blackness, embodied memory, and curiosity with the sea. Her approach is unruly and elegiac as she searches for wild, rowdy, and

Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo, Guest Faculty 2008, 2021, 2022
Nicolás Dumit EstĂ©vez Raful, Invited Artist Faculty (2008, 2021), Facilitator for “Analog Bodies & Virtual Activations” (2022) Nicolás Dumit EstĂ©vez treads an elusive route that manifests itself performatively or through experiences where the quotidian and art overlap. He hence approaches the concepts of home and belonging to the U.S. American

Paloma McGregor, Guest Faculty 2014
Paloma McGregor, Invited Artist Faculty (2014) Paloma McGregor originally from St. Croix, is an award-winning artist and organizer living in Harlem. Paloma’s work centers Black voices through collaborative, process-based art-making and organizing. A lover of intersections and alchemy, she develops projects in which communities of geography, practice, and values come together

Pamela Sneed, Guest Faculty 2010–12, 2017
Pamela Sneed, Invited Artist Faculty (2010–12, 2017) Pamela Sneed is a New York-based poet, writer, and actress. She has been featured in the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Time Out, Bomb, VIBE, and on the cover of New York Magazine. In 2015, she appeared in Art Forum and

PatrĂcia Hoffbauer, Guest Faculty 2012–18
PatrĂcia Hoffbauer, Invited Artist Faculty (2012–18) PatrĂcia Hoffbauer is a NY dance artist originally from Brazil who has collaborated with many artists, including writer/performer George Emilio Sanchez. Her work has been funded by the NEA, NYSCA, NYFA and MAP Fund. She has been produced, commissioned and presented by Danspace Project,

Peggy Shaw, Guest Faculty 2010–13
Peggy Shaw, Invited Artist Faculty (2010–13) Peggy Shaw is a performer, writer, producer, and teacher of writing and performance. She is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2016 USA Artist Fellow, and was the 2014 recipient of the Doris Duke Artist Award. Peggy co-founded Split Britches and WOW in NYC. She

Priscilla Marrero, Guest Faculty 2022-23
Priscilla Marrero, Invited Artist Faculty (2022-23) Priscilla Marrero is an experimental performing + teaching artista from sunny Seminole, TaĂno and Tequesta land, also known as Miami, Florida. She is a passionate storyteller and loves to discover new ways to collaborate with interdisciplinary artistas through live performance or filmmaking. She is

Reverend Billy, Guest Faculty 2008–10
Reverent Billy, Invited Artist Faculty (2008–10) Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir believe that Consumerism is overwhelming in our lives. The corporations want us to have experienced only through their products. Our neighborhoods, “commons” places like stoops and parks and streets and libraries, are disappearing into the corporatized

Ricardo Gamboa, 2010 (and Guest Faculty, 2011)
Ricardo Gamboa, 2010 (and Invited Alumni Faculty, 2011) Ricardo Gamboa (They/ Them/ Theirs) is an artist, activist and academic. Ricardo is currently staffed on THE CHI for showtime, and is writing the pilot for YOSHUA at HBOMax with Issa Rae & Scott Free producing; they are also developing a feature project with Macro. Before

Robert Farid Karimi, Guest Faculty 2021, 2023
Robert Farid Karimi, Invited Artist Faculty (2021, 2023) With 25 years of expertise as cross-disciplinary performer, poet, educator, conceptual dramaturg, and social engagement artist, Robert Farid Karimi brings nourishment, playfulness, and interactive storytelling to spaces worldwide – from General Mills to Off Broadway to Nuyorican Poets Café to HBO’s Def

Sonia Guiñansaca, Guest Faculty 2013 and 2017
Sonia Guiñansaca, Invited Artist Faculty (2013 and 2017) Sonia Guiñansaca is a Queer Migrant Poet, Cultural Organizer, and Activist from Harlem by way of Ecuador. Guiñansaca a VONA/Voices alumni who has performed at El Museo Del Barrio, The Nuyorican Poets Cafe, NY Poetry Festival, Galleria de La Raza, and featured

Soomi Kim, Guest Faculty 2013
Soomi Kim, Invited Artist Faculty (2013) Soomi Kim is a Korean born, New York City based actor/movement artist (dancer, stage combat/martial arts, choreographer, former gymnast). She has worked as a company member with several artists as well as producing, creating and performing her own work, almost always in the collaborative

Susana Cook, Guest Faculty 2011–17
Susana Cook, Invited Artist Faculty (2011–17) Susana Cook, born in Argentina, is a New York-based playwright, director, and performer who has been producing original work for over 20 years. Her work has been presented in numerous performance spaces in New York City, including Dixon Place, PS. 122, W.O.W Cafe Theater,

Tavia Nyong’o, Guest Faculty 2014
Tavia Nyong’o, Invited Scholar Faculty (2014) Tavia Nyong’o is a Professor of African-American Studies, American Studies, and Theatre and Performance Studies at Yale University. His research interests include the ethics & aesthetics of social & cultural analysis. His books include The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory

The Illuminator, Guest Faculty 2016
The Illuminator, Invited Artist Faculty (2016) The Illuminator is an art-activist collective comprised of visual artists, educators, filmmakers, and technologists living and working in New York City. The collective has staged hundreds of projection-interventions in public spaces, transforming the street from a space of passive consumption and transit into a

The World Famous *BOB*, Guest Faculty 2014
The World Famous *BOB*, Invited Artist Faculty (2014) The Word Famous *BOB*, known for her over the top blonde bombshell image and incredible ability to mix martinis in her cleavage, has captivated audiences all over the world with her unique burlesque stylings, humorous performance art, and MC skills. She has

Tim Miller, Guest Faculty 2011
Tim Miller, Invited Artist Faculty (2011) Tim Miller is an internationally acclaimed performance artist. Miller’s creative work as a performer and writer explores the artistic, spiritual and political topography of his identity as a gay man. Hailed for his humor and passion, Miller has tackled this challenge in such pieces

UNIVERSES, Guest Faculty 2011
UNIVERSES, Invited Artist Faculty (2011) Universes is a National / International ensemble Company of multi-disciplined writers and performers who fuse Poetry, Theater, Jazz, Hip-Hop, Politics, Down Home Blues and Spanish Boleros to create moving, challenging and entertaining theatrical works. The group breaks the bounds of traditional theater to create their