MIAMI, FL.- Influential performance and video artist, accomplished writer and active curator, Coco Fusco will deliver a riveting new performance about the expanding role of American women in the War on Terror On Friday, November 3rd at 8pm at the Manuel Artime Theater located at 900 SW 1st Street, Miami, FL. In this original production, Fusco’s persona is a female graduate of military intelligence school and a seasoned interrogator who briefs the audience on the rationales for using sexual innuendo as a tactic for extracting information from Islamic Fundamentalists. The presentation explores how a career in military intelligence represents great opportunities to emancipated women of the 21st century who have finally shed their victim hood and seek to follow in the footsteps of Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, General Barbara Fast, Asst. Secretary of Defense Allison Barber, and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. Presented as part of The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum’s esteemed Steven & Dorothea Green Critics’ Lecture Series, this performance is a unique opportunity for the South Florida community to witness a contemporary, cutting-edge and critically acclaimed performance artist FREE OF CHARGE.

Fusco’s recent art projects combine electronic media and performance in a variety of formats, from staged multi-media performances incorporating large scale projections and closed circuit television to live performances streamed to the internet that invite audiences to chart the course of action through chat interaction. Her current performances and videos address the roles of female interrogators in the War on Terror. Those works include Operation Atropos (a film about interrogation training), Bare Life Studies (a series of street performances about military prison exercise drills) and A Room of One’s Own (a monologue about female interrogators).

Based in New York Fusco has performed, lectured, exhibited and curated extensively around the world since 1988. She is the author of English is Broken Here (1995), The Bodies That Were Not Ours and Other Writings (2001) and the editor of Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (1999) and Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (2003). Born in Cuba in 1960, Coco Fusco earned her bachelors' degree in Literature and Society and Semiotics at Brown University and a masters' degree in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University. Fusco is currently an associate professor in the Visual Arts Division of Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Fusco's works have been included in The Whitney Biennial, Sydney Biennale, The Johannesburg Biennial, The Kwangju Biennale, The London International Theatre Festival, and VideoBrasil. Her 1993 documentary about her caged Amerindian performance with Guillermo Gómez- "Ladies and gentlemen, it was the great British writer Virginia Woolf who argued that every woman had to have a room of her own in order to manifest her strengths. At the onset of the new millennium, American women finally have what they need to demonstrate their prowess. The War on Terror offers an unprecedented opportunity to the women of this great country."

Peña, The Couple in the Cage, has been screened in over two hundred venues around the world. Her latest video, a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert, was selected for the 2004 Shanghai Biennale and the Museum of Modern Art’s Documentary Fortnight in 2005. Her video installation, Dolores from 10 to 10, received an honorable mention from the 2003 Transmediale in Berlin. Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self, an exhibition Fusco curated for the International Center of Photography on racial taxonomy in American photography, is currently touring the U.S.