Guillermo Gomez Pena

Guillermo Gómez-Peña is a performance artist, writer, activist, radical pedagogue and artistic director of the performance troupe La Pocha Nostra. Born in Mexico City, he moved to the US in 1978, and since 1995, his three homes have been San Francisco, Mexico City and the “road”.

His performance work and 21 books have contributed to the debates on cultural, generational, and gender diversity, border culture and North-South relations. His artwork has been presented at over one thousand venues across the US, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Russia, South Africa and Australia. A MacArthur Fellow, USA Artists Fellow, and a Bessie, Guggenheim, and American Book Award recipient, he is a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines in the US, Mexico, and Europe and a contributing editor to The Drama Review (NYU-MIT), the Venice Performance Art Week Journal, and emisférica, the publication of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics (NYU). Gómez-Peña is currently a Patron for the London-based Live Art Development Agency, and a Senior Fellow in the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics.

Latest work:

Since March 2020, Gómez-Peña and La Pocha Nostra have adopted a hybrid practice where virtuality and media (film, radio, sound art, photo-performance, online performance & pedagogy) provide ways to continue creating work and reaching trans-national “live” audiences and communities of difference. LPN has never stopped creating and presenting performances, continually pushing the boundaries of how to adapt performance, installation, spoken word and “living archives” (a cosmology of iconic materials, props, costumes, original photo, video, print materials & ephemera engaged with performatively) to newly enhanced virtual formats and the artistic and philosophical challenges posed by confinement.

In 2021, as a featured Fellow in the MacArthur Foundation’s 40th anniversary programming, Gómez-Peña was commissioned to write and present a virtual performance keynote and call to action titled: An Open Letter to the Museums of the Future and create a media-based public exhibition Gómez-Peña’s Casa Museo: A Living Museum and Archive at the Jane Addams Hull House Museum (Chicago). Through sound, image and performance, the keynote and exhibition offers “a borderless world where geographic, municipal, gender and other borders are dismantled to allow public institutions to reflect and serve all.”

As of mid-2024, Gómez-Peña is working on completing five performance films, producing his weekly podcast with Lumpen Radio/Public Media Institute (Chicago) titled The Mex Files: Audio Art and Strange Poetry from the US/Mexico Border and touring his live duet performance and divination ritual with Balitronica which features brand new material written in the past two years.

For exclusive viewing of photo/video/diary entries and advanced information about performances, workshops films, publications and special projects please join Gómez-Peña on Patreon at: www.patreon.com/guillermogomezpena/

Currently married to Balitronica Gómez

Mentor and Artist in Residence April 2023 and July 2024 : See more

‘El Naftazteca,’ 1994. Photo: Clarissa Horowitz