Creative Capital

Secos & Mojados

Victor D. Cartagena is a Salvadoran-born multidisciplinary visual artist. He has exhibited his work in solo and group exhibitions at venues in the United States including Intersection for the Arts, Ampersand International Arts, Catharine Clark Gallery, the University Art Museum at UC Berkeley, the Sonoma Museum of Visual Arts, the Oakland Museum, MACLA/Center for Latino Arts, the 18th Street Arts Complex and Art LA. Internationally, his work has been seen in Mexico, Japan, El Salvador, Belarus, Ecuador and Greece. Cartagena received a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation 2001 Visual Arts Purchase Award, the Art Council (Artadia) Award and two Pacific Prints awards.

Roberto Gutierrez Varea is a stage director who began his career in theater in his native city of Cordoba, Argentina. In the U.S., he has directed numerous productions and workshops associated with new play development, particularly with Latin@-Chican@ artists. Roberto is the founding artistic director of Soapstone Theatre Company, a collective of male ex-offenders and female survivors of violent crime, and of El Teatro Jornalero!, a performance company that brings the voice of Latin American immigrant workers to the stage. He is the director of the Center for Latino Studies in the Americas (CELASA) at the University of San Francisco. Roberto is Associate Editor of Peace Review (Routledge, U.S.), and guest editor of e-misférica (NYU) and Contemporary Theater Review (Routledge, U.K.). The first book of his two-volume anthology Acting Together: Performance and the Creative Transformation of Conflict was just published by New Village Press.

Violeta Luna is a performance artist and activist whose work explores the relationship between theatre, performance art and community engagement. Working within a multidimensional space that allows for the crossing of aesthetic and conceptual borders, Luna uses her body as a territory to question and comment on social and political phenomena. Born in Mexico City, Luna obtained her graduate degree in Acting from the Centro Universitario de Teatro, UNAM and La Casa del Teatro. She has performed and taught workshops extensively throughout Latin America, Europe, Africa and the U.S.. In addition to Secos & Mojados, Luna is a member of the Magdalena Project of International Women Performance Artists and is an associate artist of the San Francisco-based performance collective La Pocha Nostra.

David Molina is a composer, musician, sound designer and engineer who has worked in theatre, performance art, film, video, radio, dance and multimedia productions for 17 years. During that time, he has worked on numerous pieces with fellow Secos & Mojados artists Varea, Luna and Cartagena individually. Recent credits include: PBS & NIOT documentary Light In The Darkness; A 16-channel soundscape in Utopia/Nightmare: The American Dream; The Magic Twins at El Teatro Campesino; Lost And Found, a live soundtrack to the films of Anna Geyer; Homage to Musee Mecanique with painter Susie Valdez; Coming To California, a video installation by Cause Collective, Oakland Museum of California; and a 2009 LA Ovation Award with Chris Webb for music/sound design to Lydia at Mark Taper Forum. Molina is also a member of the bands Ghosts and Strings and Transient.

Antigone Trimis is an arts educator, theater director and dramaturg. As the Implementation Manager of San Francisco Unified School District’s Arts (SFUSD) Education Master Plan, she has also served as Director of Outreach and Recruitment for School of the Arts High School from 2004–06. She has worked with the Magic Theatre, the Bay Area Playwrights Foundation (BAPF,) and the Engineers Alliance for the Arts, serving in both artistic and administrative positions. Trimis has served as Board President for Intersection for the Arts and the Bay Area Playwrights Foundation. She holds an MA in theater from Brown University.