Every two years, the Hemispheric Institute hosts an Encuentro—part academic conference, part performance festival—in a different site in the Americas. Fostering experimentation, dialogue, and collaboration, each Encuentro brings together between 500 and 700 scholars, artists, activists and students to take part in a week-long program of keynote lectures, work groups, teach-ins, performances, installations, roundtable and long table discussions, urban interventions, visual arts exhibits, and hands-on performance workshops.
Past thematic topics of the Encuentros have been: “Performance and Politics in the Americas” (2000), “Memory, Atrocity, and Resistance” (2001), “Globalization, Migration and the Public Sphere” (2002), “Spectacles of Religiosities” (2003), “Performing ‘Heritage’: Contemporary Indigenous Performance and Community-Based Practices” (2005), “Corpolíticas/Body Politics: Formations of Race, Class and Gender in the Americas” (2007), “Staging Citizenship: Performance and Politics of Cultural Rights” (2009), “Cities | Bodies | Action: The Politics of Passion in the Americas” (2013), and “Manifest!: Choreographing Social Movements in the Americas” (2014).