PENNY ARCADE - Penny Arcade debuted in 1968 at 18 with New York’s explosive Play-House of the Ridiculous, the seminal, rock and roll, queer, glitter/glam, political performance theater that influenced everything from Hair to Punk. A Warhol Superstar at 19 featured in the 1972 Warhol/Morrissey comedy, "Women in Revolt". Penny is the author of over 16 full length plays and hundreds of solo performance pieces. She is an independent artist who's active career spans over 50 years, contributing to new art forms for every decade since the 1960’s. A highly influential performance and experimental theatre artist , her magnetic stage presence has brought her international renown, her compassionate yet unflinching honesty has influenced generations of artists everywhere, making her an icon of artistic resistance. Adelaide Fringe Ambassador for 2023, she recently performed Episode 3 – 1967-1974: "Superstar Interrupted" from Penny Arcade: The Art of Becoming, a memoir, live show and podcast being conceptualized and created by Penny Arcade and Steve Zehentner.
STEVE ZEHENTNER - A former architect, Steve Zehentner is a filmmaker, theater designer/director and archivist based in New York City. Since 1992, he has collaborated with Penny Arcade on dozens of shows including Sisi Sings The Blues – Vienna Festival, Love, Sex and Sanity, Rebellion Cabaret, New York Values, Bad Reputation, True Stories, The Penny Arcade Sex & Censorship Show, Old Queen and Longing Lasts Longer. Together they have created anarchic humanist spectacles, over 900 performances in 50 cities around the world. They are currently developing, The Art of Becoming, a ten-part live episodic memoir. With Penny Arcade, he is co-founder of the Lower East Side Biography Project, a video oral history documentary project that works to ensure that future generations have access to the mad souls of invention that built the Lower East Side’s reputation as an incubator for authenticity, rebellion and iconoclasm. The project streams it's biographies live every Monday at 11pm EST in Manhattan on Time Warner Channel 34.Steve has worked in video production for over 25 years producing story-based social independent documentaries and promotional films for universities and non-profit organizations. His work is held in the collection of many museums, and screened at dozens of festivals. His short films, The Color Line: Racism in America and The Sunflower Project, a film that questions the limits of forgiveness through the lens of the WWII holocaust, have been broadcast on PBS. He recently produced a six part series on Multilingual Learners for the PBS children’s series, Let’s Learn. He is a recipient of an Aurora Film & Video Award, Herald Angel, Fringe First, NYSCA grants and MacDowell, Bogliasco, Orchard Project Fellowships.
