José Torres-Tama is a published poet and playwright, journalist and photographer, renegade scholar and arts educator, visual and performance artist, cultural activist and Artistic Director of ArteFuturo Productions in New Orleans.

Since 1995, he has toured his genre-bending shows nationally and internationally, and has performed in the academy at numerous institutions. Torres-Tama has presented his provocative spectacles, interactive workshops, and "Live Art" multimedia lectures on performance as a catalyst for social change.

From 2006 to 2011, Torres-Tama contributed commentaries to NPR’s Latino USA news journal on the many challenges of the reconstruction of New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina. Diálogos Books New Orleans has published Immigrant Dreams & Alien Nightmares, a debut collection of twenty-five years of poems that have informed seven solos.

Torres-Tama is also the recipient of a 2008 Joan Mitchell Foundation Award for the publication of his first art book by the Ogden Museum of Southern Art called New Orleans Free People of Color & Their Legacy, which documents his expressionistic pastel portraits of 18th and 19th century Creoles of color who fought to dismantle the institutional injustices of their times. Hard Living in the Big Easy: Latino Immigrants & Rebirth of New Orleans
 is a book in the making that chronicles his NPR commentaries and writings documenting the human rights violations experienced by immigrants post-Katrina.