Bio

Marlène Ramírez-Cancio is a Puerto Rican cultural producer, artist, and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. As Artistic & Co-Executive Director of BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange, a multigenerational arts organization nurturing creative expression and artistic process, she creates spaces of inquiry and praxis for artist-led initiatives. Since 2008, she has directed EmergeNYC, an incubator and affinity network for socially engaged artists to develop their creative voice, explore the intersections of art and activism, and connect to a thriving community of BIPOC, migrant, and LGBTQIA+ practitioners. Now housed at BAX, EmergeNYC fosters a brave space for experimentation, risk-taking, and mutual accountability, and has over 350 alumni in New York City and beyond.

Through Mujer Que Pregunta, Marlène works as a Process Doula and Tarot practitioner, helping artists, scholars, and cultural workers shape their ideas and clarify their vision. As Artist in Residence with Aster(ix) Journal, she created the Chancletazo for Your Soul deck, a reimagining of the Tarot Major Arcana with Latinx cultural icons. Marlène also co-founded Fulana, a Latina satire collective (active 2000-2018), and leads yearly satire and parody workshops for emerging artists.

She is a Steering Committee member of LxNY | Latinx Arts Consortium of New York and serves on the Board of Directors of the National Performance Network and the Board of Advisors of the Center for Artistic Activism. She is also a founding member of the Cultural Equity Coalition of New York.

Previous Experience

Until 2020, Marlène served as the Associate Director, Arts and Media at NYU’s Hemispheric Institute, where she cultivated her passion for connecting artists, scholars, and activists. She created spaces of creative inquiry and critical practice that energized struggles for justice in the Americas. During her 17-year tenure at Hemi, Marlène led the curation and production of large-scale Encuentros, hybrid conference-festivals that gathered around 700 participants in various cities every few years. She also created and directed EmergeNYC and Hemi’s Artist Residencies for local NYC artists and co-created initiatives like the Helix Queer Performance Network, which supported queer artists of color and fostered intergenerational mentorship.

Through the Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library (HIDVL), a groundbreaking digital archive that documents and circulates the work of politically engaged artists, Marlène ensured that the practices of diverse emerging, mid-career, and master artists were nurtured, documented, made publicly available, and preserved for future generations. In 2018, she curated “Cuerpxs Radicales: Radical Bodies in Performance,” a live art series presented at the Brooklyn Museum in conjunction with the "Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985" exhibition.

Marlène holds an MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish from NYU, an MA in Comparative Literature from Stanford University, and a BA in Comparative Literature from Harvard University.