Argentine-born bassist and producer Pablo Aslan directs Avantango, a tango-jazz ensemble featuring New York–based Argentine musicians and dancers. His 2007 CD Buenos Aires Tango Standards (Zoho Music) blends tango and jazz to reinterpret tango standards, and his CD Avantango (Zoho Music) was selected by JAZZIZ magazine for its Critics’ Choice 2004. Aslan has been a special guest with Lincoln Center’s Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra led by Arturo O’Farrill, Chamber Music at Lincoln Center, Chamber Music Northwest, and Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. In 2005, Aslan collaborated with the French choral ensemble Ecume, in Montpellier, France, on their tango-operetta Tango du Couteau and directed The Tango Group on their release Amor por el Tango (Soundbrush Records). In the 1990s, he was the founder and codirector, with bandoneónist Raul Jaurena, of New York Buenos Aires Connection and New York Tango Trio. Aslan has been a featured artist of the Lincoln Center Institute since 1998, bringing tango performances to children and educators in the New York area. In addition to performing and recording with Yo-Yo Ma, Wynton Marsalis, Shakira, the New World Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and many others, Aslan lectures on tango music history throughout the country.
Homi K. Bhabha
Homi K. Bhabha is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities in the Department of English at Harvard University; director of the Humanities Center at Harvard University; and distinguished visiting professor in the humanities at University College, London. The author of The Location of Culture (Routledge, 1994) and editor of the essay collection Nation and Narration (Routledge, 1990), he is currently at work on A Measure of Dwelling, a theory of vernacular cosmopolitanism forthcoming from Harvard University Press, and The Right to Narrate, forthcoming from Columbia University Press. Most recently, he completed the introduction to a new translation of Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth; “Still Life,” an essay on the work of the photographer Michal Safdie; and a catalogue essay on the African artist Georges Adeagbo.
Dario Boente
A musician who performs romantic tango and jazz compositions on a grand piano, Dario Boente also programs worldbeat electronica. Brought up in Argentina and Spain immersed in the culture of tango and Brazilian music, he pursued his formal studies at the Guildhall School of Music in London, Berklee School of Music in Boston, and the New School Jazz and Contemporary Music Program in New York, and his social life in the dance/electronica scene of Ibiza, London, Madrid, and New York. In 1999, Dario moved to New York City. Since then, he has released three CDs, featuring well-known jazz musicians like drummer Antonio Sanchez (Pat Metheny Group), drummer Victor Jones (Stan Getz, Chaka Khan), guitarist Ronny Jordan, flutist Jorge Pardo (Paco de Lucia, Chick Corea), and others. Currently, Dario leads his own bands, plays with percussionist Luis Quintero, and works in the studio with R&B multi-Grammy award winner Joshua Thompson (George Benson, Luther Vandross, Alicia Keys).
Alicia Borinsky
Born in Buenos Aires, novelist, poet, and literary critic Alicia Borinsky is a professor of Latin American and comparative literature and director of the Writing in the Americas Program at Boston University. In 1996, she received the Latino Literature Award for her novel Sueños del seductor abandonado (Ediciones Corregidor, 1995; published in English as Dreams of the Abandoned Seducer, University of Nebraska Press, 1998). She writes in English and Spanish and has published extensively in Europe, Latin America, and the United States. Borinsky has been the recipient of several awards, among them a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Her most recent book is a bilingual volume of short fiction, Golpes Bajos/Low Blows (The University of Wisconsin Press, 2007).
Octavio Brunetti
Octavio Brunetti, a pianist and arranger, studied classical piano in Argentina. He has shared the stage with many of Argentina’s most important tango musicians and singers, such as Eladia Blazquez, Alberto Castillo, Ruben Juarez, Horacio Salgan-De Lio, and Atilio Stampone. He coarranged the piece “Levante” by Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov, and he has performed at the world-famous Teatro Colon and the Teatro San Martin in Buenos Aires and the Teatro San Martin in Cordoba, Argentina. In 2002, he was named conductor of the Provincial Orchestra of Popular Music in Cordoba, Argentina. In 2004, he won the New York City International Tango Competition Award for best solo pianist and best duo (Brunetti-Monk). He now successfully tours with his own band, the Octavio Brunetti Quintet, and is one of the most sought-after tango pianists of our times. His recordings include Saludos, with Domingo Federico; Tierra y Asfalto, by Brunetti-Carballo; and Inquietudes, with the Omar Torres Quintet. Brunetti has recorded “Soledad” (Astor Piazzolla) with world-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma, a performance that appears on the CD Appassionato on Sony BMG-Classical.
Fernanda Cajide
A native of Buenos Aires, Fernanda Cajide is a dancer who has studied, taught, and performed tango for more than ten years. At the age of five, she started ballet and jazz, turning to tango in her teens. In 1996, Cajide began performing professionally at some of the most popular tango venues in Buenos Aires, including La Cumparsita, Sans Souci Palace, and El Viejo Almacen. In the United States, she has performed at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the International Folk Festival in Boston, Regattabar and Ryles Jazz Club in Cambridge, Kresge Auditorium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northeastern University, the Somerville Theater, Berkshire Community College in Pittsfield, Northampton Center for the Arts, Regis College in Weston, Joe’s Pub in New York City, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She has also performed at several events organized by the Boston Tango Society. Cajide is in high demand all over the Northeast, where she regularly offers instruction, workshops, and performances. She currently teaches at the Tempo Dance Center in Brighton, Massachusetts.
Juan Eugenio Corradi
Juan Eugenio Corradi was born and educated in Buenos Aires. He studied sociology in the United States and is currently a professor at New York University and at the IMT Institute of Advanced Studies in Lucca, Italy. He is also president of the South North Development Initiative and coeditor of the journal Opinión Sur. His books include The Fitful Republic: Economy, Society, and Politics in Argentina (Westview Press, 1985), Fear at the Edge: State Terror and Resistance in Latin America (University of California Press, 1992), and Los Hilos del Desorden: Primeras trayectorias geopolíticas del siglo XXI (del Umbral, 2006). He lives in Manhattan and sails around the world.
Dario Da Silva
Dario Da Silva is an Argentine-born and -trained tango dancer. At age seventeen, he started dancing professionally in festivals throughout Argentina, including the Primer Encuentro Nacional de Tango with the orchestra Juan de Dios Filiberto. For the past seven years, Da Silva has taught and performed in the United States. He has performed in numerous dance events in New York, including the DanceFlurry Festival and the NY Tango Festival. He performed The Four Seasons of Love with maestro Raul Jaurena at the Thalia Theatre and was a guest artist for the New Generation Dance Company. For the past two seasons, he has been part of the Tango Fusion Dance Company. In Massachusetts, he has performed in Dance Across the City at the Wang Center for the Performing Arts; for the past three years, he has served as the principal dancer for MassTango Productions and performed in the Boston Tango Festival. He has performed at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) and the Somerville Theater. Da Silva was recently part of the movie Life Is the Dream in the Cinema: Pola Negri (2006) by director Mariusz Kotowsky.
Deborah Foster
Deborah Foster is a head tutor and senior lecturer in folklore and mythology and director of studies for special concentrations at Harvard University. Her current research interests extend and expand on her East African research on Swahili oral narrative and dance performance. At Harvard since 1988, she has served as Allston Burr Senior Tutor of Currier House and assistant dean of undergraduate education. Before coming to Harvard, she taught in the African and Asian Institute’s Department of Folklore at the University of Khartoum in Sudan and in the dance department of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She received her PhD in African languages and literature with a minor in dance performance and choreography from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Florencia Garramuño
Florencia Garramuño is the director of the Program in Brazilian Culture at the University of San Andrés in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She received her PhD in Romance languages and cultures from Princeton University in 1995. She has written and edited many books on Brazilian and Argentine literatures and cultures, among them Genealogías Culturales (Beatriz Viterbo, 1997), a comparative study of Brazilian, Uruguyan, and Argentine literature from the 1980s, and Modernidades Primitivas: tango, samba y nación (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2007). She is the series director of Vereda Brasil, of Corregidor Press, where she has translated and edited Brazilian literature. She is assistant editor of Margens/Márgenes, a binational journal published in Argentina and Brazil.
Osvaldo Golijov
Osvaldo Golijov is a composer who has received commissions from major ensembles and institutions in the United States and Europe and has been the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, among many other awards. His music is performed regularly by musicians such as Maya Beiser, Miguel Harth-Bedoya, and Robert Spano; the Borromeo, Kronos, and St. Lawrence quartets; and orchestras such as the Boston Symphony and Los Angeles Philharmonic. He has been a composer-in-residence at Merkin Hall in New York, the Spoleto USA Festival, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Music Alive series, Marlboro Music, Ravinia, and other festivals. Notable works include a one-act opera, Ainadamar (Fountain of Tears), with a libretto by David H. Hwang, commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra for premier at Tanglewood; a set of folk songs, Ayre, featuring Dawn Upshaw and commissioned by Carnegie Hall; the sublime La Pasión según San Marcos, commissioned by Helmuth Rilling for the European Music Festival to commemorate the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of J. S. Bach’s death; and, most recently, his cantata Oceana, featuring Luciana Souza and the Atlanta Symphony Chorus and Orchestra. The releases of his work on the Deutsche Grammaphon label are continually met with critical acclaim, garnering many awards, including several Grammys.
Merilee Grindle
Merilee Grindle is the Edward S. Mason Professor of International Development and director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. She is a specialist on the comparative analysis of policymaking, implementation, and public management in developing countries, with particular reference to Latin America, and she earned her PhD in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Grindle is the author of several books, including Bureaucrats, Politicians, and Peasants in Mexico: A Case Study in Public Policy (University of California Press, 1977) and Audacious Reforms: Institutional Invention and Democracy in Latin America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), and numerous articles about policy management. Her most recent book is Going Local: Decentralization, Democratization, and the Promise of Good Governance (Princeton University Press, 2007). Grindle is also the editor of Politics and Policy Implementation in the Third World (Princeton University Press, 1980) and Getting Good Government: Capacity Building in the Public Sectors of Developing Countries (Harvard University Press, 1997) and coauthor, with John Thomas, of Public Choices and Policy Change: The Political Economy of Reform in Developing Countries (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), which won an award for best book on public policy in 1991.
Barbara J. Grosz
Barbara J. Grosz is the interim dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. Before becoming interim dean of the Institute, she served as its dean of science. Grosz has been a member of the Harvard faculty since 1986, first as the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science, and she has led several efforts aimed at increasing the participation of women in science. Her own research in computer science, focused on finding ways to make computers behave more intelligently, draws on her long-held interests in linguistics, psychology, and philosophy. Grosz is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an elected member of the American Philosophical Society. She is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the Association for Computing Machinery, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1993, she became the first woman president of the AAAI. She serves on the executive committee and is a former trustee of the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence.
Alma Guillermoprieto
Alma Guillermoprieto, who has written about Latin America for English-language publications for nearly thirty years, is a frequent contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. Her essays and reportage from these publications have been collected in The Heart that Bleeds: Latin America Now (Knopf, 1994) and Looking for History: Dispatches from Latin America (Pantheon, 2001). In addition, she is the author of Samba (Knopf, 1991), a chronicle of the carnival year in a favela in Rio de Janeiro, and Dancing with Cuba: A Memoir of the Revolution (Pantheon, 2004), an account of the six months she spent teaching modern dance in Havana in 1970. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a former MacArthur fellow. She was a Radcliffe Institute fellow in 2006–2007.
Tine Herreman
Tine Herreman does science by day and deejays for fun at night. She plays devastating tangos, soaring valses, and irresistible milongas—and some very groovy alternatives, when the crowd is so inclined. Herreman deejays regularly around the Northeast. Over the past year, New York gigs have included Bailatango, Chelsea Market, El Embrujo, Nocturne, the Seaport, and Triangulo festivals; she also traveled to the Ann Arbor May Madness, Atlanta Tango Festival, Boston Tango Festival, New Year’s Eve in Montreal, Tango de los Muertos, Tango Joven in Chicago, the Yale Tango Fest, and others. Herreman was the founding president of the Yale Tango Club, and organized, taught, and deejayed for the club from 2003 to 2007. She developed the club from a small practica to the most active social club on campus, with almost weekly workshops with visiting teachers and a national festival. She also started several networks for deejay and community development.
Matthew B. Karush
Matthew B. Karush is an associate professor of history and the director of the Latin American Studies Program at George Mason University. He received his PhD in history from the University of Chicago in 1997. He is the author of Workers or Citizens: Democracy and Identity in Rosario, Argentina, 1912–1930 (University of New Mexico Press, 2002) as well as several book chapters and journal articles, including, most recently, “The Melodramatic Nation: Integration and Polarization in the Argentine Cinema of the 1930s” in Hispanic American Historical Review (May 2007). He has received awards and research support from the Fulbright Program, the Social Science Research Council, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is currently working on two projects: a coedited volume provisionally titled “The New Cultural History of Peronism” and a monograph on Argentine mass culture in the 1920s and 1930s.
Yo-Yo Ma
The many-faceted career of cellist Yo-Yo Ma is testament to his continual search for new ways to communicate with audiences and to his personal desire for artistic growth and renewal. Ma maintains a balance between his engagements as soloist with orchestras worldwide and his recital and chamber music activities. His discography includes more than seventy-five albums, including sixteen Grammy award winners. One of Ma’s goals is the investigation of music as a means of communication and as a vehicle for the migration of ideas. In 1998, he established the Silk Road Project to promote the study of cultural, artistic, and intellectual traditions along the ancient Silk Road trade routes. Ma was born in Paris to Chinese parents who later moved the family to New York. He began to study cello at the age of four, attended the Juilliard School, and later graduated from Harvard University. He has received numerous awards, including the 1978 Avery Fisher Prize, the 1999 Glenn Gould Prize, the 2001 National Medal of Arts, and the 2006 Sonning Prize.
Sylvia Molloy
Sylvia Molloy is the Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at New York University, where she teaches Latin American and comparative literature. Her scholarly publications include the article “La Diffusion de la Litterature Hispano-Américaine en France au XXe Siècle” (Comparative Literature, Spring 1974); the books Las letras de Borges (Sudamericana, 1979), translated into English as Signs of Borges (Duke University Press, 1994), and At Face Value: Autobiographical Writing in Spanish America (Cambridge University Press, 1991); and many essays on nineteenth and twentieth century Latin American literature and culture. Molloy has also published two novels, En breve cárcel (Seix Barral, 1981), translated into English as Certificate of Absence (University of Texas Press, 1989), and El común olvido (Norma, 2006), and a collection of short prose, Varia imaginación (Beatriz Viterbo, 1993). She is coeditor of Women’s Writing in Latin America: An Anthology (Westview, 1991) and Hispanisms and Homosexualities (Duke University Press, 1998). Molloy has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and she is a past president of the Modern Language Association and the Instituto Internacional de Literatura Latinoamericana. She is currently writing a book about homecoming narratives and a third novel.
Federico Miguel Monjeau
Federico Miguel Monjeau is a professor of musical aesthetics at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. He is a music critic for the Argentinean newspaper Clarin and serves on the editorial board of the journal Punto de Vista. He has written numerous articles about tango, including “Fue Lindo Mientras Duró—Contribuciones Auna Critica Del Tango” (Punto de Vista, No. 86, December 2006). His recent book La Invencion Musical (Paidos, 2004) revises the notions of form, progress, and representation in Western classical music.
Tova and Carlos Moreno
Tova and Carlos Moreno were hooked on the Argentine tango at first encounter. Now, ten years later, they are still under its spell. Always striving to express the music more completely through the dance, their dynamic style reflects the rich variety in tango music, as they move seamlessly from sophisticated to simple; rhythmic and punchy to slow and powerful. The Morenos are regularly invited to teach workshops in cities across the continent and are among the favorite instructors of tangueros at Brandeis University, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their energy and zest, coupled with Carlos’s scientific training in vertebrate locomotion, enable the Morenos to connect particularly well with students. They were original members of Michelle Badion’s tango dance group, which mounted shows in Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington. Their Boston performance in a well-received tango show in 2005 was declared by the Boston Globe “the most sizzling tango of the evening.” The Morenos organize an annual tango festival in Boston, Tango de los Muertos, which will be held November 8–11, 2007. The festival is full of workshops, costumes, and all-night dancing. For more information, visit their Web site: http://www.morenotango.com.
Adriana Pegorer
Adriana Pegorer is a cross-disciplinary artist. Born in Italy, she moved to London in 1995 and graduated with degrees in dance and art from the University of Chichester in 2001. Her dance film thesis Double One, which relates tango to Jungian symbolism, won a Lea Anderson Choreography Award and was screened at major international dance film festivals. She has directed and danced in her own experimental projects that mix tango with other dance forms and new technologies, including Adagio, con Brio, Farewell, Dear Compadrito, Still Excited, Tango S’ Alone, and Tango Graffiti. She has received awards and recognitions from several organizations, including the Arts Council of England for her research in dance, culture, and new technologies.
Victor Prieto
Accordionist Victor Prieto, whom New York Post called an “accordion genius,” earned his classical music diploma at the Conservatoro de Música de Ourense in Spain and studied jazz at the Estudio Escola de Música in Spain. He has a degree in accordion performance from the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Studying with jazz pianist Joanne Brackeen, he has developed an innovative technique for playing jazz on the accordion. He was the winner in the jazz category of the 2001 Citta di Castelfidardo International Competition for accordion concert performers. An alumnus of Paquito D’Rivera’s acclaimed ensemble, Prieto has toured extensively through Europe and the United States. He performs nationally as a member of Pablo Aslan’s tango-jazz ensemble Avantango. He also performs in the New York City area with Emilio Solla’s NY Tango Jazz Project, with guitarists Julio Santillan and Clay Ross, with tango singer Maria Cangiano, and with his own trio.
Susan Rose
Susan Rose is a choreographer and faculty member in the Department of Dance at the University of California at Riverside. Her work has been seen at the Highways Performance Space, Jacob’s Pillow, Occidental College, and the Sushi Performance and Visual Art theater. In 2002, she worked with Marta Savigliano on the tango-opera thriller Angora Matta, which premiered in Buenos Aires. She served as guest choreographer for the Lewitzky Dance Company, which toured several pieces nationally and internationally. From 1976 to 1989, she was the director of Danceworks, supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Council of the Arts.
Marta Elena Savigliano
Marta Elena Savigliano holds a PhD in political science from the University of Hawaii at Manoa and a licenciatura in anthropology from the Universidad de Buenos Aires. Her work addresses the politics of culture: the transitional traffic of cultural goods, workers, ideologies, and the effects of global capitalism. She is the author of Tango and the Political Economy of Passion (Westview, 1995), translated into Turkish and Japanese, and Angora Matta: Fatal Acts of North South Translation (Wesleyan University Press, 2003). Angora Matta emerged from the libretto for a tango-opera thriller. An experimental presentation of the complete work—in collaboration with composer Ramon Pelinski, choreographer Susan Rose, and animator Miguel Angel Nanni—took place in the Teatro Presidente Alvear of Buenos Aires in November 2002 as a US-Argentine coproduction involving thirty artists on stage. Savigliano is currently working on reconfigurations of identities and corporealities provoked by mobilizations in globalism and war. Savigliano has been invited to lecture at universities worldwide.
Mariano Siskind
Mariano Siskind is an assistant professor of Romance languages and literatures at Harvard University. His research and teaching focus on nineteenth and twentieth century Latin American literature and intellectual history and the intersection between political philosophy and literary discourse. He is a coeditor of Poéticas de la distancia: Adentro y afuera de la literatura argentina (Norma, 2006) and has published articles in Comparative Literature Studies, Conradiana, Hispamérica, La Biblioteca, Revista Iberoamericana, Variaciones Borges, and in several edited volumes. Siskind is working on a book, currently titled “Margins of the Universal: A Critique of Latin American Cosmopolitan Reason.”
Diana Sorensen
Diana Sorensen is the dean for the arts and humanities, the senior advisor to the provost for arts and culture, a professor of comparative literature, and the James F. Rothenberg Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. Before joining the Harvard faculty in 2001, she worked at Columbia and Wesleyan universities. She is a specialist in nineteenth and twentieth century Latin American literature, with additional expertise in cultural theory and gender theory. Among her varied writings on Latin American literature are The Reader and the Text: Interpretative Strategies for Latin American Literatures ( John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1986); Facundo and the Construction of Argentine Culture (University of Texas Press, 1996), which won the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize from the Modern Language Association in 1996; and Sarmiento: obras (Espasa Calpe/Biblioteca de Literatura Universal, 2002). Her most recent publication, released in August, is A Turbulent Decade Remembered: Cultural Scenes from the Latin American Sixties (Stanford University Press, 2007).
Julie Taylor
Julie Taylor, a classically trained dancer and anthropologist, combines abiding interests in aesthetics with concerns with violence and trauma. In Argentina, where she has spent twenty years, she has worked on themes of politics, human rights law, and violence as they emerged in the years of the dictatorship of 1976–1983. In 1976, she published the first English-language article on tango. In the mid-1980s, she continued writing on traumas haunting Argentine memories. Meanwhile, she began to study tango as dance, like many Argentines seeking roots after exile and war. She wrote on this apprenticeship with its interwoven threads of violence in Paper Tangos (Duke University, 1998). Later, she continued an intensive study of the dance, teaching and performing in Argentina and becoming part of the milonga, the circuit of dancehalls. Milongas house tango as social events, distinct from shows and classes. Taylor’s current work concerns relations of the milonga with the theater genre known as the Argentine grotesque. Taylor is also the author of Eva Peron: The Myths of a Woman (University of Chicago, 1979). She is professor emerita of anthropology at Rice University. Her work on the tango has been supported by the Fulbright Program and John Simon Guggenheim fellowships.
