Alicia Ivonne Estrada is a professor in the Chicana/o Studies Department at California State University at Northridge. She has published on the Maya and Guatemalan diaspora in Los Angeles as well as on contemporary Maya literature, film and radio. She is co-editor with Karina O. Alvarado and Ester E. Hernández of the critical anthology U.S. Central Americans: Reconstructing Memories, Struggles and Communities of Resistance (University of Arizona Press, 2017). Estrada’s work has appeared in Romance Notes, Latino Studies, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, among other journals and anthologies. Her current book project is on the Maya diaspora in Los Angeles. Since 2006, she has actively collaborated with the Maya radio collective Contacto Ancestral. The show has been on the airwaves for over a decade on the community radio station KPFK.
Genner Llanes-Ortiz is a Maya researcher from Yucatán, México. He trained as a social anthropologist at the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatan (UADY) in Mexico, and completed a DPhil in Social Anthropology in the University of Sussex, United Kingdom. His research is interested in Indigenous movements, intercultural dialogue, subaltern epistemologies and Indigenous performing arts. He has conducted collaborative research with NGOs and Indigenous organizations in the Yucatán Peninsula, Ecuador, Belize and Guatemala. His work has explored forms of representing Indigenous knowledge in intercultural education projects in Latin America. He has also worked on aspects of performatic expression in the cultural and political mobilization in the Maya region. More recently, he is focusing on various Indigenous artistic forms (like digital and performance art, cinema and music) and their relation to anti-racism and language revitalization.He was part of the Indigeneity in the Contemporary World project in Royal Holloway University of London (2011-2013), and has worked in the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS) in Mexico City (2014-2015). He is currently a member of the Centre for Indigenous America Studies (CIAS) and assistant professor in the Faculty of Archaeology at Leiden University in The Netherlands.
Juan (Xuno) López Intzín is a Maya Tzeltal scholar who holds a bachelor’s degree in Sociology from the Facultad de Ciencias Sociales-Universidad Autónoma de Chiapas, and a master’s degree in Social Anthropology from the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. He has collaborated with NGOs on mental health issues for those displaced by the 1997 Acteal massacre, and has also worked with organizations such as Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Bartolomé de las Casas on different initiatives of and for indigenous populations. He is a founding member of the Kol-lek-tivo Snajtaleltik, Bats’il-k’op, A.C. and the Chiapas Network of Artists, Community Communicators, and Anthropologists, as well as a member of the Interdisciplinary Network of Researchers of the Indigenous Peoples of Mexico.
Mary Louise Pratt is Professor Emerita at NYU, where she taught in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford University. Her research includes work on Latin American Literature and Latin American Studies, comparative literature, linguistics, literary theory, postcolonial studies, feminist and gender studies, anthropology, and cultural studies. Her publications include: Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992; 2nd ed. 2007), a well-known study of the discursive formation of Latin America and Africa in metropolitan travel literature. With the west coast SOFA collective, she co-authored Women, Culture and Politics in Latin America (1993). A collection of her work appeared in Spanish in 2017 titled Los imaginarios planetarios (Madrid: Aluvion). Her most recent work as a critic and scholar includes reflections on neoliberalism and culture, language and globalization, and contemporary indigenous politics and thought. Pratt stresses the dynamic relations between high culture and popular movements, between gendered narratives and official legends, between national politics and global markets. A collection of her work in English is in preparation with Duke University Press.
Jesusa Rodríguez is a scenic creator. From 1980 to 2018, she directed and performed in opera, theater, and political farces. Since December 2018, she has been a Senator in Mexico. Her greatest achievement was, and still is, to accumulate disgrace. She was awarded Best Actress at the Festival of the Americas in Montreal, 1989, and is a recipient of a 2000 Obie Award, with Liliana Felipe.
Miguel Rojas-Sotelo, Adjunct Professor in international comparative studies at Duke University, is the Special Events Director for the Duke Center for Latin American Studies and Director of the NCLA Film Festival. Miguel holds a PhD in Contemporary Cultural Theory, Latin American and Visual Studies. His recent books explore cultural policy, environmental/indigenous subjectivities and audiovisual production, among them: Irrupciones, compresiones, contravenciones. Arte contemporáneo y política cultural en Colombia, Uniandes Press 2017. BE PATIENT | SE PACIENTE. Artistic and medical entanglements in the work of Libia Posada, ASP 2019. Miguel won the 2017-2018 National Prize in Art and Essay Criticism by the Colombian Ministry of Culture; a compilation book was published with his essay titled “Soberanía Visual in Abya Yala” in 2019.
A. Joan Saab is the Susan B. Anthony Professor of Art and Art History and the Vice Provost of Academic Affairs at the University of Rochester. Her first book, For the Millions: American Art and Culture Between the Wars (2004, 2nd ed. 2009) was the inaugural volume in the “Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America” series published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. She is also the author of a born-digital project entitled Searching for Siqueiros; written on the digital publishing platform Scalar . Her recent book Objects of Vision: Making Sense of What We See is forthcoming in the Sensory History Series for Pennsylvania State University Press (2020). She is presently at work on another project tentatively entitled, Tales From the Crypt: Vincent Price and American Visual Culture.
Marcos Steuernagel is Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre & Dance at the University of Colorado Boulder, working at the intersection of performance and politics, Brazilian and Latin American theatre and performance, and the digital humanities. He holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Performance Studies from New York University, and a Specialization in Cinema and Video and a B.A. in Theatre Directing from Faculdade de Artes do Paraná, in Brazil. Marcos is co-editor with Diana Taylor of the multilingual digital books What is Performance Studies? (Duke University Press; HemiPress, 2015). His recent articles have appeared in TDR: The Drama Review and Latin American Theatre Review, and his upcoming monograph traces the relationship between politics and aesthetics in contemporary Brazilian theatre and dance. Before joining CU Boulder, Marcos was Arts & Humanities Postdoctoral Associate at New York University Abu Dhabi, Adjunct Instructor at the departments of Drama and Performance Studies at New York University, and Full-Time Instructor at the Theatre Department at Faculdade de Artes do Paraná, Brazil.
Diana Taylor es Profesora de los Departamentos de Performance Studies y Español en la Universidad de Nueva York (NYU). Es la autora de libros ganadores de importantes premios como Theatre of Crisis (1991) [Teatro de la Crisis], Disappearing Acts (1997) [Actos de Desaparición], The Archive and the Repertoire (2003) [El archivo y el Repertorio] y Performance (2016). Su más reciente libro, ¡Presente! The Politics of Presence [¡Presente! La Política de la Presencia] aparecerá con Duke University Press. Taylor el cual ayudó a fundar en 1998. En 2017, Taylor fue la presidenta del Modern Language Association y en 2018 fue introducida en la Academia Americana de Artes y Ciencias.
Byrt Wammack Weber is an independent artist and researcher; professor at the Escuela Superior de Artes de Yucatán; founding director of the Mexican media arts organization, Yoochel Kaaj; and honorary member of the National System of Art Creators (SNCA-SC-FONCA). His audiovisual works and installations have been presented in the Americas and Europe. He holds a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in Political Economy and Continental Philosophy; a Master of Economics from the same university, and a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from the University of Washington. He is the author of “Mayan landscape architects and territorial aesthetics in the Yucatan Peninsula” (Gremium Magazine, 2018); “Mayan Visions of Autonomy and the Politics of Assimilation” (with Ana Rosa Duarte in Comparative Indigeneities of the Americas, University of Arizona Press, 2012); and editor, with Freya Schiwy, of Adjusting the Lens. Community and Collaborative Video in Mexico (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016). His current project “Aesthetic translocations of a post-contemporary territory” received support in 2015-2018 from the National Fund for Culture and the Arts (SC-FONCA). He lives and works in Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico.
Paul M. Worley is Associate Professor of Global Literature at Western Carolina University. He is the author of Telling and Being Told: Storytelling and Cultural Control in Contemporary Yucatec Maya Literatures (2013; oral performances recorded as part of this book project are available at tsikbalichmaya.org), and with Rita M. Palacios is co-author of Unwriting Maya Literature: Ts’íib as Recorded Knowledge (2019). He is a Fulbright Scholar, and 2018 winner of the Sturgis Leavitt Award from the Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies. In addition to his academic work, he has translated selected works by Indigenous authors such as Hubert Malina, Adriana López, Manuel Tzoc, and Ruperta Bautista.
Moysés Zúñiga Santiago is originally from San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico. He is a self-taught photographer, videographer, and radio broadcaster. Influenced by the 1994 armed uprising of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, he studied journalism and has worked as a TV producer, photo editor, and press photographer since 2000 in the city of Xalapa, Veracruz. In 2006 he spent one year traveling throughout Mexico as part of the campaign for Subcomandante Marcos. Upon returning to Chiapas, he began to work as a freelance photographer for international news agencies such as the newspaper La Jornada. His journalistic work covers the following topics: grassroots social movements, paramilitarism, the EZLN, and migration and the environment.