Alberto Guevara was born in Nicaragua. Under the Nicaraguan Sandinista government, he participated in a cultural brigade and received training at the National Theatre School. In Toronto, Montreal, and Lethbridge, he has collaborated in a number of intercultural theatre organizations including Teatro Sin Fronteras, Mise au Jeu, and Act!vision. Alberto holds an interdisciplinary doctoral degree (Performance, Communications, and Cultural Anthropology) from Concordia University. His work focuses on a number of interconnected areas, including the theatricality of power, performance and nationalism, the aesthetics of violence and affliction, and the body in performance. Alberto’s latest film Terra Sacer (2008) plays with text, stills, and video to perform suffering as presented by pesticide-afflicted Nicaraguans camped out in front of their National Palace. While engaging a pressing social issue, Terra Sacer raises important questions with respect to the politics of representation, such as, what are the possibilities and limits of making bodies in pain speak? How can one represent self-narrated “victims” while avoiding victimizing narratives?

Alberto’s films have been shown at DOXA Documentary Film Festival (Vancouver), aluCine Toronto Latin Media Festival, Re-frame Peterborough International Film Festival, Planet in Focus Environmental International Film and Video Festival (Toronto), Festival of Visual Anthropology ASPEKTY (Torun, Poland), Royal Anthropological Institute International Festival of Ethnographic Films (Leeds, U.K), among others. He is a professor in Fine Arts/Cultural Studies at York University in Toronto.

Artist Code: 945