MIAMI, FLORIDA.- Have you ever fantasized being from a different culture? Have you ever hired an illegal alien? Challenging our prejudices, behaviors and beliefs, renowned performance artist, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, will engage the South Florida community on Friday November 4th, 2005 at 8:00 p.m. in a solo performance presented by The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum. In this award winning solo entitled Mexterminator vs. the Global Predator, Gomez-Pena is the brujo-poeta exploring a fear of immigration, the dark-side effects of globalization, the digital divide, censorship, and interracial sexuality. His first visit to Miami in over 10 years, this event is a unique opportunity for the South Florida community to witness a contemporary, cutting-edge and critically acclaimed performance artist. The performance will take place on Friday, November 4, 2005 at 8:00 p.m. in the Green Library room GL 100 on the University Park Campus of Florida International University, 11200 SW 8th Street, Miami, FL.

For twenty years, Gómez-Peña has been exploring intercultural issues with the use of mixed genres and experimental languages. Continually developing multi-centric narratives and large-scale performance projects from a border perspective, Gómez-Peña creates what critics have termed "Chicano cyber-punk performances," and "ethno-techno art." In his work, cultural borders have moved to the center while the alleged mainstream is pushed to the margins and treated as exotic and unfamiliar, placing the audience members in the position of "foreigners" or "minorities." He mixes English and Spanish, fact and fiction, social reality and pop culture, Chicano humor and activist politics to create a "total experience" for the viewer/reader/audience member. These strategies can be found in his live performance work, his radio chronicles, his award-winning video art pieces, and his books. Through his organization La Pocha Nostra, Gómez-Peña has focused very intensely in the notion of collaboration across national borders, race, gender and generation as an act of citizen diplomacy and as a means to create "ephemeral communities" of rebel artists.

Gómez-Peña's performance, installation and video work has been presented at over seven hundred venues across the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Europe, Australia, Russia, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Brazil, Peru, Venezuela and Argentina. Most recently, he has presented work at Tate Modern (London), the House of World Cultures (Berlin), MACBA (Barcelona), The Chopo Museum (Mexico City), the Encuentro Hemisférico (Lima, Rio de Janeiro, and New York City) and the Habana Bienale.

Gómez-Peña currently resides in San Francisco where he is artistic director of Pocha Nostra. Born in 1955 and raised in Mexico City, he came to the US in 1978. His pioneering work in performance, video, radio, installation, poetry, journalism, and cultural theory, explores cross-cultural issues, immigration, the politics of language, "extreme culture" and new technologies. A MacArthur fellow and American Book Award recipient, he is a regular contributor to National Public Radio, a writer for newspapers and magazines in the U.S. and Mexico, and a contributing editor to The Drama Review (NYU-MIT). Among numerous fellowships and prizes, Gómez-Peña was a recipient of the Prix de la Parole at the 1989 International Theatre Festival of the Americas (Montreal), the 1989 New York Bessie Award, and the Los Angeles Music Center's 1993 Viva Los Artistas Award. In 1991, Gómez-Peña became the first Chicano/Mexicano artist to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. In 1995, he was included in The UTNE Reader's "List of 100 Visionaries." In 1997 he received the American Book Award for his book New World Border. The film version of his solo performance Border Brujo (in collaboration with Isaac Artenstein), was awarded first prize in the 1991 National Latino Film and Video Festival and first prize in the category of "Performance Film" at Cine Festival (San Antonio 1991).