Photo: Kari Orvik
EMAIL: aeromestiza@sbcglobal.net
Gigi Otálvaro-Hormillosa, Ph.D. is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, educator, psychogeographer, and Miami native, currently based in Northern California. She obtained her doctorate of philosophy in Theater & Performance Studies with a minor in Art History from Stanford University. She holds a M.A. from California College of the Arts in Visual and Critical Studies and a B.A. from Brown University in an independent concentration entitled “Hybridity and Performance.” She is the recipient of the first-ever Stanford Theater & Performance Studies Department Carl Weber Prize for Integration of Creative Practice and Scholarly Research for her doctoral work and dissertation entitled Erotic Resistance: Performance, Art, and Activism, in San Francisco Strip Clubs, 1960s-2010s. Her book project, Erotic Resistance: The Struggle for the Soul of San Francisco, is based on the dissertation and will be published by University of California Press in spring of 2024. Her M.A. thesis, Embodying Spaces: Memory and Resistance in the Aftermath of Argentina’s Dirty War (1976-1983), focused on cultural memory, embodiment, and the politics of space in relation to human rights activism, public art, and memorials in the aftermath of the dictatorship. Her work in performance and video has been presented nationally and internationally.
She currently serves as Associate Director of Stanford Living Education at Stanford University where she leads the LifeWorks Program for Integrative Learning. This program offers courses and workshops that integrate scholarship, creative expression and embodied practices such as mindfulness and self-reflection to help students connect their academic work with their core values and goals. Her research and pedagogy engage Latina/x and women of color feminisms, queer of color critique, erotic performance, mindfulness-based art practice, as well as art and activism. Prior to her current position, she was a Teaching Fellow in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford, where she taught research-based writing courses exploring the connections between visual art, performance, embodiment, and mindfulness. She is also certified as a Laughter Yoga Leader and Yoqi® Qigong Associate Instructor who currently designs and teaches classes that combine laughter yoga, qigong, and other movement-meditation practices with theater and performance exercises.
From 2002 to 2008, she directed her own arts organization (a)eromestiza, dedicated to presenting cutting edge video and performance by queer artists of color. Her writing has been published in San Francisco MOMA’s Open Space, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, Art Practical, Performance Research, Social Justice Journal, shellac, artistmanifesto.com, Antithesis Journal: Sex 2000 and anthologies such as Postcolonial and Queer Theories: Intersections and Essays and Pinay Power: Peminist Critical Theory / Theorizing the Filipina American Experience. She has received awards from the Association of Latin American Art, the Stanford Office of the Vice Provost for Graduate Education and the Stanford Women’s Community Center (the university-wide Graduate Feminist Scholar Award), Core77, Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art, the San Francisco Art Commission, the Potrero Nuevo Fund Prize, and the National Association for Latino Art and Culture, among others.
View my complete CV here: Otalvaro CV_June 2024