Nao Bustamante is an internationally known artist, originally from California. Her work encompasses performance art, video installation, visual art, filmmaking, and writing. She has exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the New York Museum of Modern Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Sundance International Film Festival, Outfest International Film Festival, El Museo del Barrio Museum of Contemporary Art, First International Performance Biennial, Deformes in Santiago, Chile and the Kiasma Museum of Helsinki, among others. In 2001 she received the prestigious Anonymous Was a Woman fellowship and in 2007 named a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, as well as a Lambent Fellow. In 2008 She received the Chase Legacy award in Film and was the Artist in Residence of the American Studies Association in 2012. In 2013, Bustamante was awarded the CMAS-Benson Latin American Collection Research Fellowship and a Makers Muse Award from the Kindle Foundation. In 2014/15 Bustamante was the Queer Artist in Residence at UC Riverside and in 2015 she was a UC MEXUS Scholar in Residence at the Vincent Price Art Museum in Los Angeles. Bustamante’s video work is in the Kadist Collection. She is alum of the San Francisco Art Institute, New Genres Program and the Skowhegen School of Painting. She is Associate Professor and Vice Dean of Art at the USC Roski School of Art and Design. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Claire Colebrook is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Penn State University. She has written books and articles on literary theory, feminist theory, contemporary European philosophy, poetry, visual culture and queer theory. She is the author of New Literary Histories (Manchester UP, 1997), Ethics and Representation (Edinburgh UP, 1999), Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum 1997), Gilles Deleuze (Routledge 2002), Understanding Deleuze (Allen and Unwin 2002), Irony in the Work of Philosophy (Nebraska UP, 2002), Gender (Palgrave 2003), Irony (Routledge 2004), Milton, Evil and Literary History (Continuum 2008), Deleuze and the Meaning of Life (Continuum 2010), and William Blake and Digital Aesthetics (Continuum 2011). She co-authored Theory and the Disappearing Future with Tom Cohen and J. Hillis Miller (Routledge 2011), and co-edited Deleuze and Feminist Theory with Ian Buchanan (Edinburgh University Press, 2000), Deleuze and History with Jeff Bell (Edinburgh 2008), Deleuze and Gender with Jami Weinstein (Edinburgh UP 2009) and Deleuze and Law (Palgrave) with Rosi Braidotti and Patrick Hanafin. She is the co-editor, with Tom Cohen, of a series of monographs for Open Humanities Press: Critical Climate Change. She recently completed two books on Extinction for Open Humanities Press: The Death of the Posthuman, and Sex After Life. She is now completing a book on fragility (of the species, the archive, and the earth).

Kency Cornejo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of New Mexico. She is a scholar of modern and contemporary Latin American art history with a specialization on Central America and its diaspora. She obtained her doctoral degree from Duke University and holds an MA from the University of Texas at Austin and a BA from UCLA. Her work explores the intersection between race, gender and coloniality in art and visual culture, and addresses issues of racism, violence, femicide, immigration, prisons, captivity, transnationalism, gangs and Diasporas. From her research, she has designed and taught courses such as ‘Art, Visual Culture & Politics in Central America,’ ‘Experimental Art and Politics in Latin America, Post 1968,’ and ‘Decoloniality, Indigeneity and Art in Latin America.’ She has published on these topics and is currently working on her first book manuscript based on her dissertation, Visual Disobedience: The Geopolitics of Experimental Art in Central America, 1990-Present. Kency was born in Los Angeles to Salvadoran immigrant parents and raised in Compton, California.

Beatriz Cortez is a visual artist and a cultural critic. She was born in El Salvador and migrated to the United States in 1989. She holds a Ph.D. in Latin American literature from Arizona State University where she wrote her dissertation on post-war Central American fiction. She has written on the aesthetics of cynicism in Central America, racism and culture, indigenous rights, violence, and memory. She teaches literature, art, and film courses in Central American Studies at California State University, Northridge. Her current research interests include nomadism, simultaneity, and multiple temporalities in the dislocated experiences of populations in movement. Her artwork explores simultaneity, as well as the existence in different temporalities and different versions of modernity, particularly in relation to memory and loss in the aftermath of war and the experience of immigration, and in exploration of possible futures. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Jennifer Doyle is professor of English at UC Riverside. Her publications include Campus Sex/Campus Security (Semiotexte, 2015), Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (Duke University Press, 2013) and Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (University of Minnesota Press, 2006). She is currently working on a book about segregation logics as accessed in artworks engaged with sport cultures. In 2015, she curated Nao Bustamante: Soldadera for the Vincent Price Art Museum, and is a member of Human Resources Los Angeles, where she has been collaborating on a series of events exploring the meaning and possibilities of decolonization within the worlds of experimental art.

Rafa Esparza was born, raised, and is currently living in Los Angeles. Esparza is a multidisciplinary artist who works in a range of mediums from installation to sculpture, drawing to painting, with the key dynamic live performance. He is inspired by his own relationship to colonization and the disrupted genealogies that result from such encounters. Esparza is persistent in staging situations where he attempts to experience a time and space inaccessible to him. Using live performance as his main form of inquiry, he addresses site specificity, materiality, memory and (non)documentation as primary tools in interrogating, critiquing and examining ideologies, power structures and binaries that problematize the “survival” process of historicized narratives and the present environments wherein people are left to navigate and socialize. Esparza traverses a variety of loci, entering and exiting traditional art spaces in favor of more relevant contexts to both address and problematize specific audiences, communities and public sites throughout the city of Los Angeles. He is a recipient of an Emerging Artist 2014 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists, a 2014 Art Matters grantee, and a 2015 recipient of a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant.

Ruth Estévez (b. 1977. Bilbao, Spain) is a writer, curator, and stage designer. She is currently the curator and director of REDCAT Gallery in Los Angeles. Between 2007 and 2011, Estévez served as the chief curator at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City, where she curated various exhibitions and projects with artists such as Guy Ben-Ner (Fold along the line, 2009), Mark Manders (Obra de Referencia, 2011), and Fernando Ortega (Levitacion asistida, 2008), among others. In 2010 Estévez cofounded LIGA-Space for Architecture in Mexico City, an exhibition platform dedicated to the experimentation in the field of architecture and spatial practice. Her current work at REDCAT has brought to Los Angeles artists like Javier Téllez (Games are forbidden in the labyrinth, 2014), Pablo Bronstein (Enlighment discourse on the origins of Architecture (2013), Allora & Calzadilla (Apotomē, 2014), Agency (Assembly: Before and After the Split second recorded), 2015) among others. Forthcoming exhibitions include a newly commissioned project with João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva, Camell Collective (Carla Herrera Prats and Anthony Graves), Ana Prvacki and Raimundas Malašauskas and a group exhibition called “Hotel Theory”, a project that looks at the performance of theory in contemporary art. She is also working on re-staging a historical performance piece from Argentinian artist Leon Ferrari in collaboration with The Getty Institute in 2017. She has written for numerous exhibition catalogues and art publications and has independently organized exhibitions in Spain, France, Belgium, and the United States, as well as in Mexico.

Regina José Galindo is an internationally acclaimed visual artist specializing in performance art. Her work has been widely exhibited in solo and group exhibitions including at Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan, Italy; the 49th, 51st, 53rd, and 54th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy; the Moscow Biennale; the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, San José, Costa Rica; the Canary Islands Biennial, Canary Islands, Spain; the Festival of Corporeal Art, Caracas, Venezuela; the Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA, and at the Tate Modern, London, U.K. Galindo is the recipient of several awards and honors, including the Golden Lion for the best artist under 35 from the 51st Venice Biennale (2005), the Prince Claus Award from the Netherlands (2011), and the Grand Prize at the 29th Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana, Slovenia (2011). Her work is included in collections such as the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, U.S.; the Castello di Rivoli – Museum of Contemporary Art, Turin, Italy; the Daros Latinamerica Collection, Zurich, Switzerland; the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX, U.S.; the Museum of Contemporary Art, San José, Costa Rica; and the Pérez Art Museum Miami and Cisneros Fontanals Collection, both in Miami, FL, U.S. She lives and works in Guatemala.

Harry Gamboa Jr. is a Los Angeles-based artist/writer/educator. He is the founder/director of Virtual Vérité (2005-Present), the international performance troupe. In addition, he is a co-founder of Asco (1972-1985), the Chicano performance group. He is a faculty member of the Photo/Media Program at the California Institute of the Arts, and a lecturer with the Chicana/o Studies Department at California State University, Northridge. His work has been exhibited nationally/internationally at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Tate Liverpool, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among several others. He has delivered artist talks at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Harvard University; Dartmouth College; Stanford University, Cornell University, and Universitair Centrum Sint Ignatius Antwerpen. His oral history is included in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. He is the author of several books including: Aztlángst 2 a fotonovela; Fallen selected poems; and Urban Exile: Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa Jr., published by the University of Minnesota Press. His work has been featured in international publications including Art in America, Frieze, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, El Pais, Arte al Dia, and in October 2011, his photograph, “Decoy Gang War Victim,” served as the cover image for Artforum.

Louis Hock is an artist and independent filmmaker. His work has been exhibited at numerous national and international art institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He has also been shown at La Panadería and Ex Teresa in Mexico City, the International Center of Photography, the Puerto Rico Triennial, the Wexner Center in Ohio, the University Art Museum in Long Beach, the Museo del Barrio in New York City, the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, among others. His cine-mural Southern California screened at the Getty and Martin-Gropius Bau as part of the “Pacific Standard Time” exhibition. His public video artwork Homeland is installed at the Bradley International terminal at LAX. His videos The Mexican Tapes: A Chronicle of Life Outside the Law (1986), and The American Tapes: Tales of Immigration (2013) document the life and times of a community of undocumented Mexican workers in Southern California. Two of his collaborative public art works (with Liz Sisco and David Avalos) Welcome to America’s Finest Tourist Plantation (1988) and Art Rebate / Arte Reembolso (1992) were recently accessioned by LACMA. Hock lives and works in Encinitas, California and is a Professor Emeritus of the University of California, San Diego Visual Arts Department.

Michael Ned Holte is a writer, independent curator, and co-director of the Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts. He has written monographic essays on artists including Kathryn Andrews, Hani Armanious, Charles Gaines, Richard Hawkins, Alice Könitz, Shio Kusaka, Roy McMakin, Ricky Swallow, Paul Sietsema, and Clarissa Tossin, and has contributed to periodicals such as Afterall, Artforum International, Art Journal, The Brooklyn Rail, East of Borneo, Frieze, Pin-Up, and X-TRA. Holte has organized exhibitions in Auckland, Los Angeles, New York, and Torino, and, along with Connie Butler, was curator of the 2014 edition of “Made in L.A.” at the Hammer Museum. He is organizing the exhibition “Routine Pleasures,” which will open at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in spring 2016.

Chico MacMurtrie is internationally recognized for his large-scale, kinetic installations, and interactive public sculpture. Graduated from UCLA in 1987, he has exhibited internationally, and has received the support of many granting agencies including the Rockefeller Foundation and the Daniel Langlois Foundation. His awards include five grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Vida Life, CEC Artslink and the Ars Electronica award. Chico MacMurtrie is the Artistic Director of Amorphic Robot Works (ARW) a collective he founded in 1991, consisting of artists, scientists, and engineers. Currently operating out of Brooklyn, NY, ARW is dedicated to the study and creation of movement as it is expressed in anthropomorphic and abstract robotic forms. MacMurtrie has been working for the past 10 years on his innovative inflatable sculptures, which have been exhibited in major museum shows and other international venues, including: Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid (2008); MUAC, Mexico City (2009); ZERO1 Biennial San José (2010); Beall Center for Art and Technology, Irvine, CA (solo show 2011); Richard L Nelson Gallery / UC Davis, CA (2011); 9th Shanghai Biennale (2012); Pioneer Works, Brooklyn (solo show 2013; 2015); SESC, Sao Paulo (2014); Cité des Sciences, Paris (2014); Triennial of New Media Art, NAMOC, Beijing (2008; 2014).

Ronald Morán was born in El Salvador in 1972. He graduated with a degree in Fine Arts from the National Center for the Arts, CENAR. He also studied Applied Arts at the Dr. José Matías Delgado University in San Salvador, as well as participated in several artist residencies in México and Spain. In 2006 he was selected by Exit Magazine in Madrid, Spain, as one of the top one hundred most influential Latin American contemporary artists. He has represented El Salvador in many international biennials, such as the 2010 IV Beijing International Art Bienalle in Beijing, China; the 2008 X Havana Biennale in Havana, Cuba; the 2007 VII Venice Biennale, in Italy, among others. His work explores social issues in different media. He lives and works in El Salvador.

Yoshua Okón was born in Mexico City in 1970 where he currently lives. His work, like a series of near-sociological experiments executed for the camera, blends staged situations, documentation and improvisation, and questions habitual perceptions of reality and truth, selfhood and morality. In 2002 he received an MFA from UCLA with a Fulbright scholarship. His solo shows exhibitions include: Piovra, Kaufmann Repetto, Milan; Poulpe, Mor Charpentier, Paris; Octopus, Cornerhouse, Manchester and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and SUBTITLED, Städtische Kunsthalle, Munich. His group exhibitions include: Antes de la resaca, MUAC, Mexico City; Incongruous, Musèe Cantonal des Beux-Arts, Lausanne; The Mole´s Horizon, Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels; Amateurs, CCA Wattis; San Francisco; Laughing in a Foreign Language, Hayward Gallery, London; Adaptive Behavior, New Museum, NY and Mexico City: an exhibition about the exchange rates between bodies and values, PS1, MoMA, NY, and Kunstwerke, Berlin. His work is included in the collections of Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Hammer Museum, LACMA, Colección Jumex and MUAC, among others.

Nonny de la Peña has been called “The Godmother of Virtual Reality” by Engadget and The Guardian, while Fast Company named her “One of the People Who Made the World More Creative” for the pioneering work in immersive journalism. As CEO of Emblematic Group, she uses cutting edge technologies to tell important stories—both fictional and news-based—that create intense, empathic engagement of the part of viewers. A Graduate of Harvard University and a former correspondent for Newsweek, de la Peña has more than 20 years of award-winning experience in print, film and TV. Her virtual reality work has been featured by the BBC, Mashable, Vice, Wired and many others. Showcases around the globe include the Sundance and Tribeca Film Festivals, the World Economic Forum in Davos, The Victoria and Albert Museum, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, and Games for Change.

Ricardo Roque Baldovinos (San Salvador, 1961) received his bachelor in Letters from Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas (El Salvador), and his M.A. in Literature and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Minnesota. He is currently professor in the Department of Communications and Culture at the Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas. He has been visiting scholar at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, the University of California Davis, the University of Richmond, as well as Universidad Rafael Landivar (Guatemala), Universidad de Costa Rica and Universidad de Chile. He was editor of Cultura, a journal published by El Salvador’s Consejo Nacional de la Cultura y el Arte. He is the author of the books Arte y parte (San Salvador, 2001) and Niños de un planeta extraño (San Salvador, 2012), as well as numerous papers on Central American Literature and Cultural Studies. He is co-editor of Tensiones de la modernidad (2010), the second volume of a History of Central American Literatures.

Tyler Stallings is the Artistic Director of the Culver Center of the Arts and Director of Sweeney Art Gallery at the University of California, Riverside. He was chief curator at Laguna Art Museum from 1999 to 2006. His curatorial projects focus on contemporary art, with a special emphasis on the exploration of identity, technology, photo-based work, and urban culture. Exhibitions that he has curated, most of which are accompanied by major catalogs and books, include Free Enterprise: The Art of Citizen Space Exploration, Lewis deSoto & Erin Neff: Tahquitz, The Great Picture: The World’s Largest Photograph & the Legacy Project, Margarita Cabrera: Pulso y Martillo, Mapping the Desert/Deserting the Map: An Interdisciplinary Response, Intelligent Design: Interspecies Art, Your Donations Do Our Work: Andrea Bowers and Suzanne Lacy, Absurd Recreation: Contemporary Art from China, Truthiness: Photography as Sculpture, The Signs Pile Up: Paintings by Pedro Álvarez, CLASS: C presents Ruben Ochoa and Marco Rios: Rigor Motors, Whiteness, A Wayward Construction, Desmothernismo: Ruben Ortiz Torres, and Kara Walker: African’t. He was a guest writer and co-curator for the book and exhibition, Backyard Oasis: The Swimming Pool in Southern California Photography, 1945-1980, organized by Palm Springs Art Museum as part of the multi-institutional Getty Research Institute initiative, Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945-1980. He is also the co-editor of the anthology, Uncontrollable Bodies: Testimonies of Identity and Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1994), and is a columnist for KCET-TV’s Artbound program.

Pilar Tompkins Rivas is Coordinator of Curatorial Initiatives at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Currently she is co-curating the exhibitions A Universal History of Infamy and Home – So Different, So Appealing for LACMA in conjunction with the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: LA-LA initiative slated to open in 2017. Within her role at the museum, she co-directs the UCLA-LACMA Art History Practicum Initiative and The Andrew W. Mellon Undergraduate Curatorial Fellowship program. Since 2002, she has curated and organized dozens of exhibitions in the US, Colombia, Egypt, France, and Mexico, working with established, mid-career, and emerging artists from around the world. As part of the Getty Research Institute’s Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980, Tompkins Rivas curated Civic Virtue: The Impact of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery and the Watts Towers Arts Center and co-curated the suite of exhibitions, L.A. Xicano, at LACMA, UCLA’s Fowler Museum, and the Autry National Center. Previously she was Curator and Director of Residency Programs at 18th Street Arts Center, and has held positions as Arts Project Coordinator at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, Curator of the Claremont Museum of Art, and Director of the Latin American branch of the Artist Pension Trust.

Javier Toscano (Mexico City, 1975; lives and works between Berlin and Mexico City) is a filmmaker, visual artist, writer, tactical urbanist and critical geographer. He was a founding member of Laboratorio 060 (lab060.org, 2003-2013), an interdisciplinary team that worked around contemporary art topics. Together they won the first prize, the Best Art Practices Award (Bolzano, Italy, 2008), for their project Frontera, A sketch for the creation of a future society, and an Honorary Mention for their project The Cause (CDA-projects, Istanbul, Turkey, 2012). He is also a founding member of Nerivela (www.nerivela.org) based in Mexico City, and the MonadenScience collective, active in Europe, with whom he works at the crossroads of social sciences, urbanism, film and artistic practices. His book on Walter Benjamin (Un mundo sin Dios, pueblo de fantasmas) won the First Accésit as the Essay Prize from the University of Navarra, Spain, in 2006. He holds a PhD in Philosophy on a double program at UNAM in Mexico and the Freie Universität in Berlin (DAAD Fellow 2009-2010). He has been awarded post-doc fellowships in Paris (Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne, 2011-2012) and Berlin (FU Berlin, 2014-2016). He is currently a member of the steering committee of the International Critical Geography Group (icgg.org).

James Wiltgen holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he wrote his dissertation on the development of television in Brazil. He has written on Latin American film, sado-monetarism, Deleuze, and the inhuman. He currently teaches at both the BFA and MA level in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts where he combines contemporary theory and historical analysis in his courses on science fiction/horror film, music of the Americas, speculative aesthetics. His current projects include an analysis of the scientific and aesthetic paradigms involved in the intersection of the Cold War and the Cold World, the dynamics of the image, and questions of realism and materialism. He has also worked extensively on questions of global violence, the forces of war, and the wages of peace.