José Torres-Tama
Friday, July 12th
8:00PM – CABARET STAGE
Saturday, July 13th
4:00PM – CABARET STAGE
José Torres-Tama is an Ecuadorian-born “Mestizo” of Quechua indigenous descent, and an interdisciplinary troublemaker. He is a published playwright and poet, journalist and photographer, renegade scholar and arts educator, visual and performance artist, and founder and Artistic Director of ArteFuturo Productions in New Orleans, the only producing entity of socially conscious Latin American theater events and performance art in the Crescent City.
In 2021, he was nominated for a prestigious Herb Alpert Award for the Arts in Theatre, and has been previously nominated for a United States Artists Fellowship.
He explores the effects of mass media on race relations; the underbelly of the “North American Dream” mythology; and the anti-immigrant hysteria currently gripping the United States of AMNESIA, which seduces you to embrace forgetting that the origin story of this so-called “beacon of democracy” is soaked in the blood of many others to propel its white supremacists beliefs.
Since 1995, he has toured his genre-bending shows nationally and internationally, and has performed at Roehampton University and Live Art Development in London; the Bluecoat Arts Centre in Liverpool; the Centre for Performance Research in Aberystwyth, Wales; and performance festivals in Canada, Mexico, Poland, and Slovenia.
In the academy, BROWN, CAL ARTS, Cornell, Duke, Ohio State University, University of Michigan, University of Maryland, UNC Chapel Hill, and many others have presented his politically provocative performances, interactive workshops, and “Live Art” multimedia lectures on performance as a catalyst for social change.
He is the recipient of a prestigious New York City MAP Fund Grant Award for his radical dinner theater on wheels called the Taco Truck Theater. The prime directive of this diverse ensemble project was that “Black Lives Matter” and “No Human Being Is Illegal.”
Also, he has received a Regional Artist Project Award from the NEA for his genre-bending performances and a Louisiana Theater Fellowship. He has received three National Performance Network (NPN) Creation Funds (2010, 2013, 2019); two National Association of Latino Arts & Culture (NALAC) NFA Grants (2006 & 2016); and two New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA) Development Grant Awards (2016 & 2021).