The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics is a collaborative, multi-lingual, and interdisciplinary consortium of institutions, artists, scholars and activists throughout the Americas. The organization's mission is to map new areas of knowledge based on understanding embodied practice - performance - as a way of creating new meaning and transmitting cultural values, memory, and identity. Through courses, work groups, conference-festivals ("Encuentros"), a digital video library, an online scholarly journal, tri-lingual website, and public forums, the Institute explores the relationship between expressive behaviour and social and political life in the Americas.