BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange Announces New Director of Practice Lab and EMERGENYC: Marlené Ramírez-Cancio

BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange has announced that Marlène Ramírez-Cancio has joined the Senior Leadership Staff as full-time Director of Practice Lab & EMERGENYC.

A Puerto Rican cultural producer, artist, and educator, with years of rich experience forging spaces of creative inquiry and critical practice, Marlène Ramírez-Cancio comes to BAX to develop a new programmatic platform, Practice Lab, and usher in a new chapter for EMERGENYC, an incubator and network for emerging artist-activists, focused on developing the voice and artistic expression of people of color, women, and LGBTQAI+ practitioners.

Practice Lab bridges Education and Artist Programs at BAX, promoting artist-led initiatives that center curricula focused on art and social justice. Led predominantly by BIPOC, queer, and disabled artists, intensive, cohort-based experiences prioritize mentorship, collaboration, and collective intergenerational learning and honor a lineage of forms often unacknowledged by higher education or classical arts training.

A hallmark of the Lab will be EMERGENYC, a program Marlène (Founding Director) co-founded with george emilio sánchez (Performance Director) in 2008 at NYU's Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, where she was Associate Director of Arts and Media until 2020.

"I can't think of a more perfect place for me to bring EMERGENYC, expanding and activating its national and international networks, as we develop other cohort-based programs for artists of color in an intergenerational context. This has been BAX's expertise for over 30 years, and I am excited to help build upon the strong, collective history, as we forge new pathways into the future," says Marlène.

Marlène is also a co-founder of Fulana, a Latina satire collective, a Process Doula (certified in the Co-Active model), a Writing Coach (for scholars and cultural workers embarking on book projects), and uses Tarot as a tool for visioning via Mujer Que Pregunta. She serves on the Board of Directors of the National Performance Network and the Board of Advisors of The Action Lab and the Center for Artistic Activism. In 2018, she curated "Cuerpxs Radicales: Radical Bodies in Performance," a live art series presented at the Brooklyn Museum in conjunction with the Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985 exhibition.

"BAX is honored and delighted to welcome Marlène to the Senior Leadership team. Her experience, sensitivity, and commitment to artists creating change will not only help nurture research, performance, and educational practices, but will deepen BAX's relationships with partner organizations and communities as we collectively seek to support a new vision for an equitable arts sector," says Kara Gilmour, BAX's Executive Director.

"Practice Lab will be a deliciously generative space," Marlène adds, "a praxis laboratory co-created with BAX's amazing Artists in Residence, alumni, and artists on staff-and I can't wait to see what we will build together."

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