La Pocha Nostra is an ever growing cross-disciplinary arts organization and non-profit based in San Francisco, California with branches in Central and South America, Europe, Asia and the South Pacific.

CURRENT CORE MEMBERS of La Pocha include Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Michèle Ceballos Michot, Saul Garcia Lopez, Balitronica Gomez, Emma Tramposch, and Nayla Altamirano. Their projects range from performance solos and duets to large scale multi-sensory performance installations involving photo, video, sound and projection.

The Great Mojado Invasion
February 17 |5:00-7:00 pm | UVA Campbell Hall
Free and Open to the Public

An evening with Latino Performance troupe extraordinaire La Pocha Nostra (Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Balitronica and Saul Garcia-Lopez). This one night only event features the screening of a newly remastered version of Gómez-Peña’s award-winning classic “mock-cumentary” on the politics of immigration. A production by Mexican filmmaker Gustavo Vasquez and Gómez-Peña, now including critical commentary on the current Trump effect. Followed by a performative discussion featuring La Pocha Nostra members. This event is part of the United States Premiere of La Pocha Nostra’s Bodas de Plata: 25 years of critical and interdisciplinary art crossing between communities of racial and gender difference.

The New Barbarians: Border Art/Photo Performance in Defiance of Traditional Documentation
Friday, February 22 | 5-7 pm| Ruffin Hall 

Join this year’s Ruffin Distinguished Artists-in-Residence, La Pocha Nostra, for a participatory photo-performance karaoke event held during the opening of their photography exhibition at Ruffin Hall! Dressing up as your favorite New Barbarian/cultural other is highly encouraged! 

Please join resident artists from La Pocha Nostra (the most influential Latino performance art troupe from the last 10 years) for a participatory “photo-performance karaoke” event to be held during the opening of a photography exhibition at Ruffin Hall. Come dressed as your favorite “New Barbarian”/cultural other, the wilder the better!

About the photographs on view: “These ‘photo-karaoke performances’ seek to dissolve the borders existing between audience, performer and photographer. Uniting this eclectic body of work is the
desire to demonstrate how an experimental performance troupe can intersect with a wider community of difference through performance photography.” -Emma, Tramposch, Managing Director, La Pocha Nostra

Photo credit: Donatella Parisini, 2018