Karina Gutiérrez is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies. Gutiérrez’s work focuses on the intersection of politics and performance, with a concentration on how digital interventions, institutionalization efforts and historical narrative have affected the development and sustainability of social and politically engaged performance companies and collectives throughout the Americas. Her reviews have appeared in journals such as Theatre Survey and The Journal of American Drama, with forthcoming publications in Modern Drama, Theatre Annual, and the Latino Literature Encyclopedia for Students. Prior to coming to UC Berkeley, Gutiérrez was an assistant professor at Santa Clara University. She earned her doctorate in theater and performance studies with a minor in feminist, gender and sexuality studies from Stanford University in 2020, upon which she was awarded the Carl Webber Prize for integration of Creative Practice and Scholarly Research. Outside of academia, Gutiérrez works as an actor, director and dramaturgist throughout the Bay Area, in addition to co-founding BALTAN, or the Bay Area Latino Theatre Alliance Network. Reviews of her directed productions have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Broadway World and Berkeleyside.
Composer (/curator/writer/researcher) Mu-Xuan Lin (林慕萱) (b.1984, Taiwan/USA) defines her life as a quest for an artistic autonomy poetically engendered by both its will and its vulnerability to one’s corporeal experience and to the world one lives in. Having had extensive training in the visual arts and creative writing and frequent exposure to theatre, dance, and literature from an early age, and profound influences from the cinema, Mu-Xuan is interested in the montage and the mise-en-scène of contemporary individuals’ fragmented yet interlaced truths, of the confusion of time and place, and of identities construed and broken. She creates with an emphasis on the kinetic formulation and transfer between various expressive art forms or matters with the sonic and temporal one. Described by the Los Angeles Times as “fascinating” and by the SRF2 kultur as “sonically sensuous,” her music has been heard worldwide, and on a SOOND (France) and an ein_klang (Austria) records. She is a guest-composer/faculty at the Novalis music+art Festival (Croatia) and the New Music on the Bluff festival (USA), the winner of the Protonwerk No.3 award (Switzerland) and Ensemble Adapter’s commission project “Adoptions 2017” (Germany), an artist-in-residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (France), an awardee of New Music USA, Max Kade, Mellon, Center for German and European Studies (DAAD program), FACE Croatia, Gardner Read, ASCAP grants, and multiple NCAF (國藝會，Taiwan) grants. Formerly, she has participated as a selected fellow at various festivals and conferences such as the Summer Academy at Schloss Solitude (Germany), Darmstadt Summer Course (Germany), EXPERIMENTALSTUDIO’s Matrix15 (Germany), June in Buffalo (USA), Acanthes de Metz (France), Sävellyspaja (Finland), and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, an Associate Artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts working with Georg Friedrich Haas, a representative for KoFoMi (KomponistInnenforum Mittersill) and the residency in Salzburg (Austria). Her works have been featured at Festival AFEKT 2022 (Estonia), Beijing Modern Music Festival 2025 (China), the Donaueschinger Musiktage – Next Generation konzert 2016 (Germany), Innovation Series 2017 (新點子樂展) (Taiwan), deciBels Festival 2020 (Latvia), the Piano Spheres Concert Series (Los Angeles), Hear Now Festival 2017 (Los Angeles), and the 180º Festival (Bulgaria) among others. She is working with ensemble 3peoplemusic (三個人, Taipei), duo NéMeu (Paris), 20º dans le noir (Paris), and sheng artist Li-Chin Li (Taiwan), and has worked with Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart (Germany), Ensemble Adapter (Germany), Ensemble Proton Bern (Switzerland), AIR Contemporary Music Ensemble (China), Secession Orchestra (France), Avanti! Chamber Orchestra (Finland), Norrbotten NEO (Sweden), members of the Lapland Chamber Orchestra (Lapin Kamariorkesteri, Finland), Talujon Percussion Group, loadbang, International Contemporary Ensemble, Urbanity Dance Project, pianist Vicki Ray, and flutist Shao-Wei Chou among many others.
Iggy Cortez is a scholar of world cinema and contemporary art whose research and teaching are broadly concerned with diasporic thought and visual culture; epistemologies of the global; the visual and sensory dimensions of digital media; minoritarian aesthetics; cinema's relation to other media; and questions of sexuality, cinematic performance, and embodiment. He is currently at work on a book project entitled
Nights on Earth: World Cinema and the Nocturnal Sensorium that explores nighttime as a conceptual and sensory threshold across recent world cinema. Through a global range of nocturnal films, this project looks at the relationship between technologically-mediated perception and the affective and sensory dimensions of the historical present. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in
The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies,
camera obscura,
Film Quarterly,
ASAP/J,
caa: reviews,
Discourse, and several edited volumes. With Ian Fleishman, he is also the co-editor of
Performative Opacity in the Work of Isabelle Huppert (Edinburgh University, 2023). Cortez was previously Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Arts and English at Vanderbilt University and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Film and Media Department at Swarthmore College. He has also curated exhibitions and film series at The Slought Foundation, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Penn Humanities Forum and The Lightbox Center.
