EVENT DETAILS

In collaboration with the Department of Asian American Studies: Robert Farid Karimi’s GREATEST HITS a performative artist talk/presentation

For one night only, interdisciplinary performance artist/writer Robert
Farid Karimi will perform his GREATEST HITS —a keynote
performance/performative artist-talk created for the 2011 Alliance of
Artists’ Communities (AAC) conference that features selections from
his main performance pieces. Karimi is the creator of critically
acclaimed works: SELF (THE REMIX)—an autobiographical tale of growing
up in 1970s & ‘80s America as the first-generation child of Iranian
and Guatemalan immigrants, FARID MERCURY—an exploration of Persian
masculinity through the lens of Queen pop star Freddie Mercury, and
the episodic theatrical cooking experience, THE COOKING SHOW CON
KARIMI & COMRADES.

A National Poetry Slam Champion, Def Poetry Jam poet, and UCLA
graduate, Karimi was the first performance artist to be invited to be
a resident at the Kohler Factory Visual Arts Residency, and has
received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA),
Illinois Humanities Council, Zellerbach Family Fund, and the National
Performance Network (NPN). In 2009, he represented the city of Los
Angeles at la Feria Internacional del Libro de Guadalajara, the
largest Spanish-language book fair in the world. He was also recently
honored as a 2009 Creative Capital & 2010 MAP Fund recipient to create
THE COOKING SHOW CON KARIMI & COMRADES: DIABETES OF DEMOCRACY. His
writing has been published internationally in journals such as
CALLALOO, LATINO LITERATURE TODAY, and RAZA SPOKEN HERE 2, as well as
the anthology TOTAL CHAOS: THE ART & AESTHETICS OF HIP-HOP, edited by
Jeff Chang. For more information, visit his blog and website:
www.kaoticgood.com and www.thepeoplescook.org.

This event is FREE and open to the public

This event is made possible with generous support from the First-Year
Integrated Program (FIP)
series "How Race is Made," the Departments of Comparative Literature, Drama,
Film & Media Studies, Women’s Studies, and the Samuel L. Jordan Center
for Persian Studies.