L. M. Bogad is a Guggenheim Fellow, Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellow. author, performance artist/activist, educator, Director of the Center for Tactical Performance, and co-founder of the Clown Army (featured in the IG video above on this page!). He has performed across the United States, Europe, and South America, from SF MOMA, the Whitney Museum, Yerba Buena Arts Center, and the Mattress Factory to occupied zones and a squatted military base in Barcelona. He has led Tactical Performance workshops around the world, including in Cairo during the first month of the Egyptian Revolution. He was the Art and Controversy Fellow and Distinguished Lecturer on Performance and Politics at Carnegie Mellon University, Humanities and Political Conflict Fellow at Arizona State University, Arts and Publics Fellow at Northwestern University, and Charlotte Newcombe Fellow for the Institute for Scholars and Citizens, and is a veteran of the Lincoln Center Director’s Laboratory. He has recently worked with North Bay Jobs With Justice on a farmworkers’ social and ecological justice campaign, founded Delivering Democracy, a troupe of singing and dancing mailboxes combating voter suppression and disinformation (featured on this page!), and hosted his podcast The Plague.

Bogad has performed and led “tactical performance” workshops in twenty countries on five continents. His performances have covered topics such as the Egyptian revolution, the struggles of indigenous immigrant farmworkers in the United States, George Orwell and the Spanish Civil War, climate disaster, the Haymarket Square Riot, the FBI’s COINTELPRO activities, and the Pinochet coup in Chile, and have received grant support from the California Arts Council, San Francisco Foundation, Creative Work Fund, Puffin Fund, Network of Ensemble Theatres, Bay Area Theatre Artists Fund, U.C. Institute for Research in the Arts, the British Academy and the British Arts and Humanities Research Council. His “Economusic: Keeping Score,” has been performed in NYC at the Austrian Cultural Forum and the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics, and at festivals in Helsinki, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Santiago, at SF MOMA, and Barcelona. His play, Cointelshow: A Patriot Act, was published by PM Press and performed at the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s Studio and in New Orleans for ArtSpot Productions. The Mondo Bizarro production of this piece was coproduced by Emerson Arts.

Bogad’s first book, Electoral Guerrilla Theatre: Radical Ridicule and Social Movements, analyzes the international campaigns of performance artists who run for public office as a radical prank. That book and his many articles on political performance are used in college classes internationally. His second book, Tactical Performance: On the Theory and Practice of Serious Play, analyzes and critiques the use of guerrilla theatre/art for human/civil rights, social justice, labor, and environmental campaigns. His third book, Performing Truth: Works of Radical Memory for Times of Social Amnesia is a collection of his scripts from the last twenty years, with commentary by an international group of scholars and artists.  He also wrote and produced a documentary, Radical Ridicule: Serious Play and the Republican National Convention.

Bogad has led Tactical Performance workshops, helping activists create performative, nonviolent images to contest and critique power, in revolutionary Cairo, Barcelona, Riga, Helsinki, Reykyavik, Buenos Aires, Trondheim, across the USA and Europe, and for the Center for Victims of Torture. He has been a commentator on political performance on Michael Krasny’s “Forum,” Air America, NPR, Pacifica, Peace Radio, and many other radio stations and programs.

Books by L.M. Bogad:

• Performing Truth: Works of Radical Memory for Times of Social Amnesia, which you can purchase here.
• Tactical Performance: The Theory and Practice of Serious Play, which you can purchase here.
• Electoral Guerrilla Theatre: Radical Ridicule and Social Movements (updated and expanded second edition) which you can purchase here.
• Cointelshow: A Patriot Act (a darkly satirical, $5 play about COINTELPRO), which you can purchase here.

See L.M. Bogad’s website for complete information on his publications, performances, workshops, and more.

Mark Kendall is an Atlanta-based comedian and co-founder of CoolCoolCool Productions with Bill Worley, where they use comedy to encourage civic engagement and community building. His comedy work has appeared on NPR, Comedy Central, HBO Max, and Adult Swim.

Ian Madrigal (they/he) is a Baltimore-based queer and transgender activist and filmmaker making social impact through creative storytelling. They are best known for photobombing CEOs in Congressional hearings dressed as the Monopoly Man and shaming Trump’s DHS Secretary out of a restaurant over the child separation policy. In addition to inspiring a “cause”-play movement, Ian is a filmmaker, attorney, organizer, musician, and writer focused on racial and economic justice, trans and queer rights, and radical democratic reform. Ian’s activism has been profiled in the New York Times, Washington Post, HBO, the Today Show, Fox News, NPR, and many more.

Ian was radicalized by political punk rock and staged their first creative protest at 14, slipping notes into the pockets of Disney clothing to expose sweatshop labor. After graduating from UCLA Law’s Critical Race Studies program, they moved to Washington, D.C., to serve as Legal Fellow with U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren and went on to direct high-profile nonprofit campaigns focused on corporate accountability, human rights, and racial justice. 

Ian was honored with a Rubys Artist Award from the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation in 2024, the Torchbearer Award from the Greenlining Institute in 2023, a filmmaking fellowship and production grant from the Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund at Johns Hopkins University in 2022, and a Recent Alumni Award from UCLA Law’s Public Interest program in 2019. They currently offer strategic consulting and narrative training to nonprofits, foundations, and progressive causes while filming on their first feature documentary, centered on their personal experience growing up trans in the 1990s.