Description
Win a One Hour Tarot Reading with Marlène Ramírez-Cancio and a Signed Copy of The Tarot Issue: Chancletazo for Your Soul, An Aster(ix) Anthology!
Offer expires June 2024.
Marlène Ramírez-Cancio is a Puerto Rican cultural producer, artist, and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. She is the Founding Director of EmergeNYC, an incubator and network for emerging artists-activists in New York City and beyond, focused on developing the voice and artistic expression of people of color, migrants, and LGBTQIA+ folks. Offering varied entry points into art and activism, EmergeNYC prioritizes process, discovery, and risk-taking, fostering a brave space of experimentation for artists who aim to build solidarity across differences and challenge dominant narratives through cultural resistance. In 2021, she brought the incubator to BAX | Brooklyn Arts Exchange, where she is currently part of the leadership staff as Director of EmergeNYC and Practice Lab. Through Mujer Que Pregunta, Marlène works as a Process Doula to help BIPOC cultural workers to shape their ideas, clarify their purpose, and make sure their projects align with the goals of their practice. She co-founded Fulana, a Latina satire collective (active 2000-2018), whose videos have been shown internationally at film festivals, museums, and universities, and whose members lead satire/parody workshops for emerging artists. Marlène serves on the Steering Committee of LxNY | Latinx Arts Consortium of New York (a network dedicated to knowledge exchange, resource sharing, and collective action), the Board of Directors of the National Performance Network, and the Board of Advisors of The Action Lab and the Center for Artistic Activism. She curated ?Cuerpxs Radicales: Radical Bodies in Performance,? a live art series presented at the Brooklyn Museum in conjunction with the Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960?1985 exhibition.
Until 2020, Marlène was Associate Director, Arts and Media at NYU?s Hemispheric Institute, where she honed her passion for connecting artists, scholars, and activists, forging spaces of creative inquiry and critical practice that enliven struggles for justice in the Americas. During her 17 years at Hemi, Marlène led the curation and production of Hemi?s large-scale, Encuentros, hybrid conferences-festivals that gathered about 700 participants in different cities every few years; created and directed EMERGENYC and Hemi?s Artist Residencies for local NYC artists; and co-created initiatives like the Helix Queer Performance Network, which supported queer artists of color and fostered intergenerational mentorship. Through HIDVL, a groundbreaking digital video library that archives and circulates the work of politically engaged artists, Marlène took great care not only to nurture the work of the diverse emerging, mid-career, and master artists she engaged, but to ensure their practices were documented, made publicly available, and preserved for future generations.
Marlène holds a BA in Literature from Harvard University, an MA in Comparative Literature from Stanford University, and an MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish from NYU.