María DeGuzmán is Eugene H. Falk Distinguished Professor of English & Comparative Literature and Founding Director of the UNC Latina/o Studies Program at The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (https://www.lsp.unc.edu). She has published three scholarly books: Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire (University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Buenas Noches, American Culture: Latina/o Aesthetics of Night (Indiana University Press, 2012); and Understanding John Rechy (University of South Carolina Press, 2019) as well as many articles and essays on LatinX lived experiences and cultural productions, most recently with an emphasis on environmentalisms and environmental justice. Furthermore, she is a music composer and sound designer with a penchant for synthesizers and polyrhythms. See https://soundcloud.com/mariadeguzman.
Gad Yola is a multidisciplinary artist. She holds a BA in Audiovisual Communication from Carlos III University of Madrid. She practices drag to generate a critical discourse on heteronormativity and European whiteness. Born in Lima, Peru, and raised in Madrid, Gad Yola strives to disrupt and question Spanish institutions, exhibition spaces, and pop culture. She expresses her dissent against racism and LGBTphobia through her musical and audiovisual production, such as the 2022 debut single “No exotice,” which was awarded Best National Music Video at the CuscoWeb Fest. Her music video, “Travesti del Perú” (“Trans from Peru,” 2023), is a call to acknowledge her native country’s queer history. Gad Yola is the mother at House of Gad and creator of “El drag es marrón” (“Drag Is Brown”), a performance piece that explores love relationships among queer people living as migrants. The cross-cutting nature of her work has led her to become a speaker, participant, protagonist, and sought-after cultural figure in Madrid.
Yeison F. García López is a poet and the director of Espacio Afro, a cultural center in Madrid. He is the author of Voces del impulso (“Voices of Momentum,” 2016) and Derecho de admisión (“Right of Admission,” 2021), and the editor of Matria poética (“Poetic Mater,” 2023). García López’s work engages with such themes as migration, anti-racism, anti-colonialism, diaspora, and community organizing. García López has served as parliamentary advisor to Rita Bosaho Gori, the first Black politician to be elected to Spain’s Congress in 2015. His writings have been published in several anthologies and alternative news venues like El Salto. The Colombian Embassy in Madrid also honored him as one of the “Ten Outstanding Colombians in Spain.”
Claudia Milian is Professor of Romance Studies at Duke University. A theorist of LatinX contemporaneity, she is the author of LatinX (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) and Latining America: Black-Brown Passages and the Coloring of Latino/a Studies (University of Georgia Press, 2013). Milian has published numerous articles and book chapters on LatinX creative practices and sociality; deracination, migration, and transnationalism; and cultural studies. She is the editor of two special issues of Cultural Dynamics centered on “Theorizing LatinX” (August 2017) and “LatinX Studies: Variations and Velocities” (February–May 2019); and co-editor of the special volumes “US Central Americans: Representations, Agency, and Communities” for Latino Studies (Fall 2013) and “Interoceanic Diasporas and The Panama Canal’s Centennial” for The Global South (Fall 2012).
Eva Obregón Blasco is a Madrid-based poet, writer, and translator with a background in international film and television content development, production, and distribution. Her areas of specialization include audiovisual translation, transcreation, music, and geophysics. As a translator, Obregón Blasco has worked on long-form documentaries, feature films, TV series, and short films for companies such as Iralta Films, MoA Studios and major multinationals like Netflix and HBO. She has several textbooks (Editorial Casals), research papers (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid), exhibition catalogues (MuVIM), and a cookbook (Penguin) to her credit, among many other works. Her poetry collection, La palabra dormida/The Sleeping Word (2023), is a Spanish/English bilingual edition that explores the limits of translation applied to poetry.
Dagmary Olívar Graterol is a founding member and director of the YoSoyElOtro Cultural Association (“I Am the Other”) in Madrid. She holds a PhD from Carlos III University of Madrid, where she also completed her MA. Her research areas investigate the changes in Spain’s migrant population, especially those of Caribbean and Latin American origin, and their participation in Madrid’s culture as well as other parts of the peninsula. Olívar Graterol is the editor of El Otrx: arte, cultura y migración en la ciudad de Madrid (“The Other X: Art, Culture, and Migration in the City of Madrid,” 2021); La comunidad dominicana en España: de una aproximación histórica a perspectivas de futuro (“The Dominican Community in Spain: From Historical Approaches to Future Perspectives,” 2019); and El mito de la mujer caribeña (“The Myth of the Caribbean Woman,” 2011), among other publications.
Nilo Palenzuela is a literary and art critic. He worked as Professor of Hispanic Literature at the University of La Laguna in the Canary Islands until his retirement in 2018. An expert of the historical avant-gardes and early modern Spain, Palenzuela has published extensively on Spanish and Latin American literature, art, and philosophy. His long career as an essayist and researcher counts many publications, including La cámara oscura (“Camera Obscura,” 2009); La hoja seca (“The Withered Leaf,” 2014); and Animales impuros (“Impure Animals,” 2017). His latest poetry collection, Otro mar, otro suelo (“Another Sea, Another Soil,” 2022), focuses on the African continent and was published by L’Harmattan in Paris as Une autre mer, une autre terre (2023). Palenzuela’s curated or co-curated exhibitions include the itinerant “Horizontes insulares” (2010–2011); Jack Beng-Thi, Casa África and CAAM Art Centre, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (2019). Palenzuela serves on the editorial board for the CAAM Art Centre’s journal Atlántica. Revista de Arte y pensamiento and as a member of the Academia Canaria de la Lengua (Canarian Language Academy).
Elia Romera-Figueroa is a postdoctoral researcher at the Autonomous University of Madrid and Glasgow University, under the CIVIS3i – Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions COFUND fellowship. Her research areas of expertise focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Iberian cultural studies, with an emphasis on gender and sexuality studies, (post)memory, and music, sonic, and performance studies. Romera-Figueroa has taught courses on global culture, social movements, collectives, and community-building in Spain at New York University Madrid and Duke in Madrid. She served as a resident researcher at the Reina Sofía Museum’s Critical Museology, Artistic Research Practices, and Cultural Studies Special Studies Program. Her writings have appeared in Bulletin of Spanish Studies and Status Quaestionis. Romera-Figueroa is currently at work on her forthcoming book, “Gendering Anti-Francoism: Cantautoras in Spain (1952–1986).” “Gendering Anti-Francoism” is the first sustained analysis that brings together gender studies and music studies, offering new historical protagonists that expand the canon of the time.
Silvia M. Serrano is a Lecturing Fellow of Spanish at Duke University. Her research areas focus on nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first century Latin American and LatinX cultural studies, with an emphasis on community radio and sound studies within Colombia’s vernacular culture. Her writings have appeared in Territories of Conflict: Traversing Colombia through Cultural Studies and Revista de Estudios Colombianos. She currently co-directs the Bass Connections project “Celebra mi herencia” (“Celebrate My Heritage”), a program that promotes reading in Spanish among Latino/a/X children in Durham, North Carolina. Serrano’s previous appointments include serving as postdoctoral associate for the Program in Latino/a Studies in the Global South at Duke University, where she also received her doctorate in Romance Studies.
Chenta Tsai, known artistically as Putochinomaricón (FuckingChinesefag), is a Madrid-based artist from the Taiwanese diaspora. Their art is a fusion of pop, Internet culture, and non-conformist aesthetics, which serve as powerful tools for fictional speculation and political resistance against prevailing Western and cis-heteronormative aesthetics. Tsai’s works explore the boundaries of self-expression, intertwining audiovisual language with bold bodily expressions and insightful lyrics that delve into everyday life and virtual existence. Their explorations emphasize the internal conflicts of a gender-racialized migrant body, reflecting a journey marked by confrontation and reconciliation with one’s identities. Their projects, whether audiovisual arts, columns in El País, or books, such as Arroz tres delicias: sexo, raza y género (“Three Delights Fried Rice: Sex, Race, and Gender,” 2019), resonate with a vibrant echo of resistance and self-exploration in the contemporary artistic landscape.
Ana Ugarte is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Latin/x American Studies at the College of the Holy Cross. Her research explores the intersections of the fields of Health Humanities and Caribbean and Latin/x American studies. Ugarte examines cultural and literary representations of health through the lens of biopolitical theory and posthumanism. Her articles have been published in journals such as Revista de Estudios Hispánicos and the Journal for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. Ugarte’s book, Interocepción insular: lo patológico en la imaginación literaria del laboratorio Caribe (“Insular Interoception: The Pathological in the Literary Imagination of the Caribbean Laboratory”) is forthcoming from the University of North Carolina Press. The monograph explores how authors from the early twentieth century to the present expose the historical functioning of Caribbean territories as laboratories for political, economic, and scientific experimentation.
Raquel Vega-Durán is Senior Lecturer in Peninsular and Transatlantic Film and Literature, and Chair of the program in Ethnicity, Migration, Rights, at Harvard University. She is the author of Emigrant Dreams, Immigrant Borders: Migrants, Transnational Encounters, and Identity in Spain (Bucknell University Press, 2016). Her publications include: “United Spains? North African Immigration and the Question of Spanish Identity in Poniente” (Afro-Hispanic Review, 2013); “El mosaico textual de Amarga luz: un autodescubrimiento literario a través de la obra de Marga Gil Roësset” (Letras Femeninas, 2014); “Tales of Two Shores: The Re-Establishment of Dialogue Across the Strait of Gibraltar” (African Immigrants in Contemporary Spanish Texts: Crossing the Strait, 2015); and “Una España más allá de sus fronteras: emigrantes, inmigrantes y la ciudadanía española global” (Política Exterior, 2022). She is currently working on a book-length project entitled “Shrinking Europe: Abandoned Villages and the Repopulation of Europe in the Twenty-First Century.”
VenidaDevenida is an art collective collaboration between Ana Olmedo and Elena Águila. Architects by training, they earned their Fine Arts degree from the European University of Madrid and Master of Philosophy degrees in Media Practice from the Architectural Association in London. VenidaDevenida’s work has been exhibited in fairs such as the 2019 Milan Triennale, the 2018 Architecture Biennale in Venice; and the 2017 International Architecture Biennial in San Sebastián. Their creations have also appeared in various publications including Form Magazine: Boundaries, The Funambulist: Clothing Politics II, and Bartlebooth: Protocolos. They have received the Instituto de la Juventud (INJUVE) Creative Youth Grant for the Fem·Insurgentes project in 2017, and for the Weird Space workshop series in 2018. VenidaDevenida have developed a design practice as Expanded Matter Studio, employing graphic design, set design, and art direction. They currently teach in the Degree in Graphic Design and Multimedia at the European University of Madrid and in the Master’s in Interior Design program at the European Institute of Design.
