José Torres-Tama is an Ecuadorian-born"Mestizo" of Quechua indigenous descent, and an interdisciplinarytroublemaker. He is a published playwright and poet,journalist and photographer, renegade scholar and arts educator, visual andperformance artist, and founder and ArtisticDirector of ArteFuturo Productions in New Orleans, theonly producing entity of socially conscious Latin American theaterevents and performance art in the Crescent City.

In 2021, he was nominated for a prestigious Herb Alpert Award for theArts in Theatre, and has been previously nominated for a UnitedStates Artists Fellowship.

He explores the effects of mass media on race relations;the underbelly of the “North American Dream” mythology; and the anti-immigranthysteria currently gripping the UnitedStates of AMNESIA, which seduces you to embrace forgettingthat the origin story of this so-called "beacon of democracy" issoaked in the blood of many others to propel its white supremacistsbeliefs. 

Since 1995, he has toured his genre-bending shows nationally andinternationally, and has performed at Roehampton University and LiveArt Development in London; the Bluecoat Arts Centre in Liverpool;the Centre for Performance Research in Aberystwyth, Wales; andperformance festivals in Canada, Mexico, Poland, and Slovenia.

In the academy, BROWN, CAL ARTS, Cornell, Duke,Ohio State University, University of Michigan, University of Maryland, UNCChapel Hill, and many others have presented his politically provocativeperformances, interactive workshops, and "Live Art" multimedialectures on performance as a catalyst for social change.

He is the recipient of a prestigious New York City MAP Fund Grant Award forhis radical dinner theater on wheels called the TacoTruck Theater. The prime directive of thisdiverse ensemble project was that "Black Lives Matter" and "NoHuman Being Is Illegal." 

Also, he has received a Regional Artist Project Award from the NEA forhis genre-bending performances and a Louisiana Theater Fellowship.He has received three National Performance Network (NPN) Creation Funds (2010,2013, 2019); two National Association of Latino Arts & Culture(NALAC) NFA Grants (2006 & 2016); and two New EnglandFoundation for the Arts (NEFA) Development Grant Awards (2016& 2021).

His current touring solo show, ALIENS, IMMIGRANTS& OTHER EVILDOERS, is a sci-fi Latinonoir performance that exposes the hypocrisies of a systemthat dehumanizes immigrants while readily exploiting their labor, and wasdeveloped through a National Performance Network Creation Fund award. 

ALIENS hassold-out a two hundred seat-theater at the RUTAS 2022International Performance Festival in Toronto, Canada; and theaters inHouston, Minneapolis, New Orleans and at the Los Angeles TheaterCenter.

Performance Space 122 and Theater for the New City inNew York, GALA Hispanic Theatre in DC, the NationalHispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque, Living Arts of Tulsa,the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, and the LosAngeles Theater Center are among many arts organizations that havealso presented his provocative performances.

From 2006 to 2011, he contributed commentaries to NPR’s LatinoUSA news journal on the many challenges of the reconstruction of NewOrleans post-Hurricane Katrina.​Diálogos Books New Orleans has published Immigrant Dreams &Alien Nightmares, a debut collection oftwenty-five years of poems that have informed seven different solos.

Also, he is the recipient of a 2008 Joan Mitchell Foundation Award forthe publication of his first art book by the Ogden Museum of SouthernArt called New Orleans Free People of Color & TheirLegacy, which documents his expressionistic pastel portraits of 18thand 19th century Creoles of color who fought to dismantle the institutionalinjustices of their times. 

HardLiving in the Big Easy: Immigrants & Photography of Post-Katrina Protests isa book in the making that chronicles his ten-year photodocumentation project of Latin American immigrant activists, and theirpublic protests to expose the many human rights violations undocumentedreconstruction workers experienced while rebuilding New Orleans.

Also, this book will anthologize his many Latino USA commentaries andwritings documenting the wage theft and brutal deportations experienced bythe same immigrant people that gave their blood, labor, and love to the rebirthof a flooded city.

Since 1992, he has written and performed twelve solo shows, including hisinternationally touring performance The Cone of Uncertainty: NewOrleans after Katrina. He has directed ensemble communityperformances and student productions for CAL ARTS, DukeUniversity, Georgia College State University, CaliforniaState University Northridge, and Living Arts Tulsa, among many others.

In 2018, he was the artist-in-residence at GALA Hispanic Theatre in DC, anddirected an intergenerational ensemble of undocumented day laborers, womenworkers, and a young poet called OUT OF THE SHADOWS / Afuera dela Sombra.

They performed a live art show to protest the proposed removal of the TemporaryProtective Status (TPS) by the hater-in-chief and his cadre ofcriminals. Two guitarists from El Salvador provided the music, and theensemble performed a bilingual public intervention in the Columbia HeightsPlaza.

​The ensemble also addressed the trauma that undocumented people experience,while living in the shadows of an empire that vilifies them and easily exploitstheir labor. Some one hundred and fifty people and immigrant families saw themin the open air down the block from GALA Hispanic Theatre's facility.