Presenters

Roberto Gutiérrez Varea‘s (Argentina/US) research and creative work focuses on live performance as means of resistance and peace-building, in the context of violent social conflict. His stage work in the US has focused on Latin@/Chican@ theater and theater-in-community, including projects with Latin American immigrant workers and women survivors of violent crime. Varea is an associate editor of Peace Review, an international journal on peace and justice studies, guest editor of e-misférica a journal of performance and politics in the Americas, and Chair of the Performing Arts and Social Justice Program at the University of San Francisco.

Sanja Ivekovic (Croatia) has been a leading interdisciplinary feminist artist and activist in Croatia for more than 30 years. Since the early 80s she has been involved in political initiatives rooted in feminist concerns and has addressed women’s vulnerability to violence caused by governmental power struggles and war. Ivekovic founded the Women Artist’s Center Elektra and the Center for Women’s Studies in Zagreb. She has performed and exhibited very widely in Eastern and Western Europe including at Dokumenta and the Generali Foundation, and in the US.

Violeta Luna (Mexico) is an actress and performance artist. Luna Graduated from the Universitario de Teatro in Mexico City and has toured extensively with her all-women theater company, Grande y Pequeño. Since 1998 she has been an associated artist of La Pocha Nostra, an interdisciplinary performance collective based in San Francisco.

Elena Jovanova Marcevska (Macedonia) is a dramaturg and performance artist with a BA in Theatre and Dramatic Arts, Skopje, and a MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently doing a practice-based PhD in Visual Studies at Northampton University, UK. Marcevska has performed widely in the US, Great Britain, Europe, and southeastern Europe. Her performance art work is inspired by the political and economic crises in the Eastern European region where she has worked with refugees, orphans and women.

Iva Kovac (Croatia) is a visual artist and graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts, Zagreb. “I try to provoke a discussion with the public, by examining society as a whole–art, art theory and art criticism from a critical distance.”

Tanja Ostojić (Yugoslavia/Serbia, 1972) is an independent performance and interdisciplinary artist and cultural activist based in Berlin and Belgrade. Ostojić includes herself as a character in Situationist performances and uses diverse media in her artistic research, thereby examining social configurations and relations of power. She works predominantly from the migrant woman’s perspective and the approach in her works is defined by political positioning, humor and integration of the recipient.

subRosa is a cyberfeminist art collective committed to combining art, social activism and politics to explore and critique the intersections of information and bio technologies on women’s bodies, lives and work. Since its founding in 1998, the group has developed a “site-uational” form of trans-disciplinary art practice that creates open-ended environments where participants engage with objects, texts, technologies, and learning experiences, and interact with each other and the artists. [Faith Wilding (Paraguay/US), Hyla Willis (US)]

wo_kolektiv (Croatia) is curatorial collective founded in 2007 and dedicated to exploring relevant contemporary artistic issues in relation to feminist subjects, queer subjects and social issues, promoting in this scene especially younger artists. [Jelena Graovac, Marijana Rimanić, Tanja Špoljar]