Laura E. Pérez is associate professor of ethnic studies, core faculty in performance studies, and an affiliated faculty of both gender and women’s studies and the Center for Latin American Studies at UC Berkeley. Pérez is the author of Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities. She curated UC Berkeley's first and only US Latina/o performance art series in 2001–2 and Labor + a(r)t + orio: Bay Area Latin@ Arts Now at the Richmond Art Center in 2011; and cocurated, with Delilah Montoya, the multimedia exhibition Chicana Badgirls: Las Hociconas at 516 ARTS gallery in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 2009. She has published in numerous anthologies on feminism, Chicana/o and hemispheric decolonial cultures, and Chicana/o religiosity, as well as journals and exhibition catalogs.

About California Countercultures
Thinking Through the Arts and Design at Berkeley: California Countercultures is a UC Berkeley course cotaught by Natasha Boas, independent curator and critic of contemporary art and theory, and Michael Cohen, associate teaching professor in the African American studies department. The Wednesday public lecture series is organized by Natasha Boas. California Countercultures is sponsored by UC Berkeley’s Big Ideas program and the Arts + Design Initiative, with additional support from Cal Performances and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.