Dunkerley Dialogue with Penny Arcade and Joseph Cermatori

Penny Arcade, photo by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

Join us Thursday, April 24, at 6 pm, for a Dunkerley Dialogue with legendary performance artist Penny Arcade, an international icon of artistic resistance whose social practice is focused on the support of other artists and on the preservation of artist legacies. She will be in conversation with Joseph Cermatori, Associate Professor of English, who specializes in drama and the arts of performance, critical theory, and queer studies.

This event is free and open to the public. The program will include ASL interpretation.

Dunkerley Dialogues pair Skidmore professors with artists in a conversation format, which is often a catalyst for new connections and understandings across disciplines, and can spark new ideas for all participants. Dunkerley Dialogues are made possible by a generous gift from Michele Dunkerley ’80.

About the Speakers

Penny Arcade, aka Susana Ventura, is a poet, actress, essayist, spoken word, video, and theater maker who creates long form, text-based performance, a form of experimental theater that investigates the boundaries between traditional theater and performance art based on her poetic practice. Her focus on the creation of community as the goal of performance and her use of performance as a transformative act mark her as a true original in international theater. She is an international icon of artistic resistance whose social practice is focused on the support of other artists and on the preservation of artist legacies. She debuted at 18 in John Vaccaro’s Playhouse Of The Ridiculous. She was a teenage superstar for Andy Warhol’s Factory featured in the film Women In Revolt. Since 1999 with her collaborator of 32 years, she has co-helmed The Lower East Side Biography Project, a video oral history of downtown New York that broadcasts and streams every Monday at 11 pm. She is the author of 16 full-length works, hundreds of performances pieces, lectures, and interviews, all available online. A partial collection of her scripts and ephemera Bad Reputation was published in hardcover by Semiotext in 2010.

Joseph Cermatori is associate professor of English at Skidmore College, where he is also affiliated with the Theater Department and Gender Studies program and is current director of the Periclean Honors Forum. He specializes in drama and the arts of performance, critical theory, and queer studies. Before coming to Skidmore, he taught as a lecturer at The New School and Yale Universities. His recent book, Baroque Modernity: An Aesthetics of Theater, (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021), won the American Comparative Literature Association’s Helen Tartar First Book Prize. His other writings have appeared in PMLA, TDR, Criticism, The Brooklyn Rail, Village Voice, and the New York Times. He works frequently as a dramaturg and has been a regular collaborator with the opera director R. B. Schlather since 2010. From 2008 through 2025, he was an editor and frequent writer for the contemporary arts magazine PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. Read more about him at his personal website.

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