Performing Difference Manuscript Workshop

Indian Country: An Original One-Hour TV Pilot, Kimberly Guerrero, Assistant Professor, Theatre, Film & Digital Production

Kimberly Guerrero is a modern-day storyteller and educator who centers her practice-based research around righting the misrepresentation and under-representation of Native Americans in mainstream media. Guerrero is a founding member of The StyleHorse Collective—an award-winning group of indigenous artists who work alongside tribal peoples to create films, online content and music.  Her acting resume includes work in television (The Republic of Sarah, Longmire, Seinfeld), film (The Glorias, Cherokee Word for Water, Hidalgo) and Broadway (August: Osage County). A graduate of UCLA (BA) and UCR (MFA), Kimberly is now an Assistant Professor in Theatre, Film and Digital Production at UCR.

Choreographies of Catastrophe in the Late Holocene, María Regina Firmino-Castillo, Assistant Professor, Dance

María Regina Firmino-Castillo’s book project examines corporeal and choreographic responses to the catastrophes of modernity/coloniality, an entangled violence surfacing as ecocide but rooted in an ontological paradigm rendering some humans as objects and all matter inert. Building on her research on the role of performance in ontological destruction and regeneration during the 1980s Guatemalan genocide against Ixil Mayans, Firmino-Castillo employs anti-ethnographic approaches to engage ways dance and other corporeal praxes, in and beyond Guatemala, conjure the socio and ontogenic potentialities of catastrophe by insisting on movement, even in the space of death, and enacting more livable worlds, starting with the flesh.  

Respondent: Julie Burelle, Assistant Professor, Theatre and Dance, UCSD

Julie Burelle is assistant professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, San Diego. Her research focuses on Indigenous theatre and performance in Canada. She is the author of Encounters on Contested Lands: Indigenous Performances of Sovereignty and Nationhood in Quebec, forthcoming at Northwestern University Press. She is also a dramaturg.