Victor Payan

Victor Payan is a writer, humorist, and artist whose work promotes social justice, community empowerment, and tolerance through engaging and playful public performances that educate, enlighten, empower, and entertain. He is Founding Director of Media Arts Santa Ana, and the co-founder of OC Film Fiesta, a multicultural film festival. An award-winning cultural critic, Payan also founded LAFTA: The Latin American Free Thought Agreement, and Keep on Crossin’ Project, a multifaceted manifesto on immigration and borders of mind, body, and spirit. Together with Sandra “Pocha” Peña, he created Aztec Gold, a series of irreverent transdisciplinary interventions that utilize the iconography of Mexican wrestling to create cathartic “counter-absurdity” campaigns that inspire catalytic change. He is co-founder of the Taco Shop Poets and toured throughout California as an acoustic taco shop troubadour in 1999. Payan directed the rock and roll documentary Tijuana: La Esquina del Mundo, and his work has been featured in exhibitions, screenings, and performances at the MCA San Diego, the High Museum of Art, and other venues nationally. In 2014 he was invited to be part of a Berlin exhibit commemorating the 25th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. He participated in a performance with Guillermo Gomez Peña’s Pocha Nostra as part of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics’ Encuentro in Montreal, where he also culture-hacked the poutine burrito, which is now a Canadian culinary staple.