PENNY ARCADE
Photo by Albie Mitchell
Penny Arcade, aka Susana Ventura, is an international cultural icon, revered as a performer, poet, writer, and actress who speaks truth to power. Innovative, charismatic and magnetic, she has brought experimental theater to mainstream audiences and built a reputation for innovation, authenticity and integrity in the international art world.
Photo by Timothy Greenfield Sanders
BIOGRAPHY
Penny Arcade occupies a rare position in the American avant-garde, through her long association with the architects of the counter culture from Andy Warhol to John Vaccaro, Jack Smith, Judith Malina, Jonas Mekas, Charles Henri Ford, H.M. Koutoukas, Charles Ludlam, Tom O’Horgan and Quentin Crisp.
Penny has participated in creating new art forms in every decade since the late 1960s. She debuted at 18 in John Vaccaro’s explosive Play-House of the Ridiculous, New York’s legendary glitter/glam, rock and roll, seminal queer political theatre. At 19 she was a superstar for Andy Warhol’s Factory featured in the Warhol/Morrissey comedy, Women in Revolt. She emerged as a force in the performance art scene of the 1980s, spoken word in the 1990s and created a prolific body of experimental theater in the 1990s to the present.
She is the author of 18 full length works and hundreds of solo performances. Her text-based work, known for its high content humor and rich one-liners, has always focused on the other and the outsider, the death of bohemia, the commodification of rebellion, the erasure of history, the loss of empathy and cultural amnesia. Her use of performance as a transformative act and community building as the goal of performance marks her as a true original on the world stage.
With Patti Smith and Jackie Curtis,
Photo by Leee Black Childers, 1969.
Penny Arcade and Quentin Crisp
Performance of Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!
The Village Gate, 1992. Photo by Oliver Hadji.
Since 1992, Penny has collaborated with former architect, archivist and designer Steve Zehentner. Together they have redefined the role of space for the audience creating an inclusive, transformative and celebratory theater with over 900 performances in 80 cities around the world.
Penny with Steve Zehentner in Vienna, 1995.
Since 1977 Penny has had a social practice as an artist advocate with an early understanding of many artist's inability to self promote. For over 40 years she has been a resource for the downtown community including the general public, artists and institutions alike. She has saved, formed, preserved and promoted the archives of experiential filmmaker-performance artist Jack Smith, photographer Sheyla Baykal and writer-playwright Kenneth Brown. She has raised significant critical funds for drag icon Holly Woodlawn and Lower East Side photographer Laura Rubin without personal remuneration. From 1995 - 2007 she created living residencies in her New York loft for national and international artists unable to access artistic residencies in New York City. Throughout this period and ongoing, she has mentored over 50 artists.
With Steve Zehentner, she pioneered a new approach to non-academic oral history in their The Lower East Side Biography Project - Stemming The Tide of Cultural Amnesia, an oral history video project, archive and television biography series that has broadcast since 1999. The project’s 100+ interviews ensures that future generations have access to the mad souls of invention that built this New York City neighborhood's reputation as an incubator for authenticity, rebellion and iconoclasm. Her work as a cultural preservationist has been acknowledged by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation and Penny has hosted their annual Village Awards ceremony since 2022.
Penny has been featured in dozens of films and documentaries. Her writing has been published in numerous newspapers, journals and catalogs: Film Culture, Found Object, Verses That Hurt, Please Kill Me (The Oral History of Punk), Out of Character, Raves, Rants and Monologues from America's Top Performance Artists, Monologues for Women, Monologues For Cold Reading, Writing Your Own Monologues. A partial collection of her scripts with photos and essays, Bad Reputation, was published by Semiotext(e)/MIT. Press.
Penny is the recipient of a Bessie Award for Sustained Achievement, New York Innovative Theatre Award, Edinburgh Herald Angel, Edinburgh Fringe First, and Adelaide Fringe Award, Love and Courage Award; and residencies & fellowships: MacDowell, Yaddo, Orchard Project, Baruch College Performing Arts Center, Emily Harvey Foundation and New York Theater Workshop.
Bad Reputation Book Cover
Longing Lasts Longer 2024 Catskill
With Holly Woodlawn, Celia Cotelo, Jane Forth, Joe Dallesandro and Prindeville for Stern magazine.