Cara a Cara Symposium: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Migrants

The Cara a Cara/Face to Face Symposium will bring together three migrant artists and activists from the NYC/NJ area to engage students to think together about how often immigrants are imagined as undesirable and how artists respond to dehumanization tactics. 

The symposium will be curated to interact students with media, attend poetry writing workshops, or listen to a critical conversation between artists and scholars. Students will learn the power of art up close in times of crisis. Centering undocumented immigrant lives in dialogue with other minoritized people (Asian, queer, mixed race Latinx) through a humanistic and artistic lens, this symposium will gather our campus community to practice care collectively.  

Refreshments will be provided. Registration is required. 

Featured speakers:

Jan-Henry Gray (Speaker and Co-Moderator) is a queer poet born in the Philippines, a graduate of Columbia College Chicago's MFA program. He is the author of Documents (BOA Editions, 2019). He is the recipient of the inaugural Undocupoets Fellowship and a 2016 University & College Poetry prize from the Academy of American Poets. Gray lives in Brooklyn, NY.  

Laura X Moya Guerrero is a documentary filmmaker born in Bogotá, Colombia. Moya is a formerly undocumented, queer, and chronically ill filmmaker who holds a BFA in Film & TV Production from NYU. They have two films: The Rights of Butterflies (2012) and What the Pier Gave Us (2024).  

Dr. Alan Pelaez Lopez is an Afro-Indigenous poet, scholar, visual artist, and cultural critic from Oaxaca, México, who migrated to the United States at age five and lived undocumented for nearly two decades. Pelaez Lopez is the author of the visual poetry collection Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien (2020), which was a finalist for the International Latino Book Award, and the chapbook to love and mourn in the age of displacement (2020), as well as the editor of When Language Broke Open: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent (2023). 

Co-Moderated by Angel Sutjipto 

Angel Sutjipto was born in Jakarta. They reside on Lenape and Matinecock lands, otherwise known as New York CIty. They are a freelance writer. Their creative nonfiction works have been published in Briarpatch Magazine and in Somewhere We Are Human, an anthology edited by Reyna Grande and Sonia Guiñansaca. They are an alum of Voices of Our Nation (VONA) and Macondo Writers Workshop. A lifetime ago, they worked at various non-profits, serving migrant and LGBTQ+ youths.