Marlène Ramírez-Cancio
Associate Director, Arts & Media

Marlène Ramírez-Cancio is an interdisciplinary artist from Puerto Rico who co-founded and co-directs Fulana, a Latina video collective based in New York City. Using parody and satire as a critical tool, Fulana’s mock television commercials, music videos and print pieces respond to the ways ideologies and identities are marketed through the mass media. She is currently Associate Director of Arts & Media at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, where she heads up projects like EMERGENYC (a program for emerging performers in New York City focused on “artivist” work), the Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library (HIDVL, an online archive of rare video documenting social performance in the Americas), and works on the production of Encuentros, Special Collections on the Hemi website, and performance programming at Hemi New York funded by the Rockefeller Foundation's NYC Cultural Innovation Fund. As a member of the Advisory Committee for the Lark Theater’s “The Word Exchange,” she is involved in shaping an annual exchange program in which playwrights from Mexico collaborate with their U.S. counterparts to translate and stage each other’s work. Her academic background is in Comparative Literature, having earned her BA in Literature at Harvard University, and her MA and PhD coursework (ABD) in Comparative Literature at Stanford University. During her time in California, Marlène studied with Cherríe Moraga, performed with the San Francisco Mime Troupe and the Red Rocket Theater, and was a member of the Latina Theatre Lab, a collective of writers, performers, and directors whose work dealt with Latina identities, pop culture, and the intricacies of "belonging." In 2010, she received her MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish at New York University's Department of Spanish and Portuguese.