Ricardo Gamboa

Ricardo Gamboa (they/them), PhD,
is an award-winning artist, activist, and scholar based in their native Chicago. For over 20 years, Gamboa has created art, media, and theater that is radically produced, presented, and politicized, and aims to provide radical pedagogical interventions at the grassroots level. Examples include BRUJOS, viral web series about gay Latino doctoral students that are also witches fighting white supremacy; The Hoodoisie, an underground talk show spotlighting revolutionary activism throughout the Americas that draws hundreds of Chicagoans every episode; and, Meet Juan(ito) Doe, a play devised by an ensemble of Chicago Latino residents and based on Chicago Mexican American stories collected over a decade. Gamboa's focuses their current work on endeavors with Concrete Content, an autonomous theater company they found that mobilizes theater as a means of placemaking and popular education and entertainment. Concrete Content produced recent Chicago hit plays The Pillowman, Ruth on the Rocks, and The Wizards. In just a few years of existence, Concrete Content has garnered a substantial following for producing some of the city's most cutting-edge and socially potent theater.
In 2019, Gamboa began working as a screenwriter in Hollywood and since then has written for Amazon Prime, FX, HBOMax, and Showtime. Ricardo has won several awards including a Joyce Foundation Award and an International Connections Award from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Gamboa has a doctorate degree from New York University’s Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and M.A. in Arts Politics from the Tisch School of the Arts. They have worked with hundreds of young people using art as means for political education and self-determination.