Roberto Guti�rrez Varea began his career in theater in his native Argentina. His research and creative work focuses on live performance as means of resistance and peacebuilding, in the context of social conflict and state violence. Varea's stage work in the United States has focused on Latin@/Chican@ theatre, directing world or West-Coast premieres of works by Migdalia Cruz, Ariel Dorfman, Cherrie Moraga, and Jose Rivera (among others). He is the founding artistic director of community-based performance groups Soapstone Theatre Company, and El Teatro Jornalero!, and cofounder of the San Francisco-based collective Secos & Mojados. He is an associate editor of Peace Review (Routledge) and… guest-edited the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics' e-misf�rica . Varea is a founding faculty of the Performing Arts and Social Justice Program, and director of the Center for Latino Studies in the Americas (CELASA), at the University of San Francisco.
Polly O. Walker is assistant professor of peace and conflict studies at Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania. She is director of Partners in Peacebuilding, a private consulting organization based in Brisbane, Australia, and lectures widely on intercultural conflict resolution. Previously awarded the University of Queensland Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for Women, she conducted research on the role of memorial ceremonies in transforming conflict involving Indigenous and Settler peoples in the United States and Australia. She has been a contributing author in three books: Mediating Across Difference: Indigenous, Oceanic and Asian Approaches to Conflict Resolution (2010),… Transforming Mediation in the Asia-Pacific Region: Building Peace (2009), and Fundamentals of Organizational Behavior: Key Concepts, Skills and Best Practices (2007). She has also published articles in a broad range of international journals, and contributed chapters to several texts on conflict transformation. She is vice-chair of the Indigenous Education Institute, a research and practice institute created for the preservation and contemporary application of Indigenous traditional knowledge. Walker is of Cherokee and Settler descent and grew up in the traditional country of the Mescalero Apache.
Charles Mulekwa is an award-winning playwright, performer, composer, and producer. He began writing plays in his native Uganda and his interests center on the ways in which war within Uganda has informed Ugandan theatre. He has produced such works as The Woman in Me, The Eleventh Commandment, and A Time of Fire . He was in the National Theatre of Uganda for many years, and served as a cultural consultant for the award-winning film The Last King of Scotland . Mulekwa is currently completing his PhD in performance studies at Brown University.