Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) creates performance work that connects lived experience to the social forces that shape the lives and communities of people living in poverty. LAPD is committed to creating high-quality, challenging performances that express the realities, hopes, and dreams of people who live and work in Los Angeles’ Skid Row, and is dedicated to building community and to the artistic and personal development of its members.

John Malpede, founding Artistic Director, LAPD   
Malpede is a director, performance artist / actor, and writer who has collaborated with dancers, poets, videographers, painters and architects, and has taught at UCLA Dept. Dance / World Arts and Cultures, NYU Tisch School of the Arts -Dept. Undergraduate Drama, and The Amsterdam School for Advanced Research in Theater and Dance (DasArts)-MFA Director's Program.   His individual artist fellowships include new genre grants from New York State Council on the Arts, NEA, and California Arts Council, and a 2008 COLA fellowship from the City of Los Angeles.   He founded the Los Angeles Poverty Department in 1985.   He has received a Dance Theater Workshop's (NYC) Bessie Creation Award, San Francisco Art Institute's Adeline Kent Award and a Durfee Sabbatical Grant for his work with Los Angeles Poverty Department.  He has been featured in five video works by Bill Viola.   In 2002-05 he performed as Antonin Artaud in Peter Sellars’ production of Artaud’s For an End to the Judgment of God, in Vienna, Rome, London, Brussels, San Francisco and Los Angeles.    In 2004, he directed “RFK in EKY” a site-specific regional recreation of Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 inquiry into poverty in Appalachia.   He is a 2008 fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, where he is developing a project on intellectual property.

Henriëtte Brouwers, Associate Director
Henriëtte Brouwers is a performer, teacher and director. As Associate Director she has worked with the Los Angeles Poverty Department since 2000.  Born in the Netherlands, Brouwers completed work at the Academy for Expression by Word and Gesture in her native country and studied corporeal mime with Etiènne Décroux and 'theatre of the oppressed' with Augusto Boal in Paris. She was invited to present her work A traveling Song, featuring Brouwers and Beppe Costa, in the US by the Theatre Project in Baltimore in 1993 and has since worked with 7 Stages in Atlanta, UT in Knoxville and Touchstone Theatre in Bethlehem. She was movement director for Blue Monk, directed by Ed Smith for the 1996 Olympic Arts Festival in Atlanta, Georgia. Highways Performance Space presented her solo: la Lengua, the tongue of Cortés in 2000.  She created a 'Weeping Women‘ performance series and directed Pomona College students in Weeping Women and War in 2003, later that year La Llorona, Weeping Women on Skid Row with LAPD, performed on Skid Row and at a national conference on women and poverty at Scripps College, and recently La Llorona, Weeping Women of Echo Park with a group of Latino women who live in the neighborhood where LA Poverty Department has her office. In 2003–4, Brouwers worked with John Malpede on the creation of RFK in EKY a community-based re-enactment of Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 trip to investigate poverty in Appalachia. She is also featured in artist Bill Viola’s renowned The Passions series, which has been exhibited extensively in major museums throughout the world.

* LA Times — August 27, 2003
His spotlight illuminates the lives of the homeless
article by Sasha Anawalt (in pdf format).
Page 1 |  Page 2  |  Page 3

* LA Times - November 23, 2005
For this LAPD, the weapons are words.
Los Angels Poverty Department takes a conversation-starter to the Netherlands.
By Chrisopher Reynolds, Times Staff Writtter
Los Angeles Times 2005

* The NC Charlotte Observer - March 30, 2006
HOMELESS TELL KATRINA'S STORIES
Urban Ministry Center Troupe shows off artistic side in theatre piece
Plight of storm's evacuees inspires Charlotte show
By Julie York Coppens, Theater writer
The NC Charlotte Observer

* Philadelphia Daily News - October 31, 2006
Troupe from the 'Hood
L.A. theater company, 2 Philly groups stage play
By Shaun Brady
Philadelphia Daily News 

* Belgium Press about LEGAL*ILLEGAL - March 2007
Nieuwpoort theater magazine 
De Standaard interview 
De Standaard - tussen Skid Row en Roma 
Cutting Edge review - Vlaams
Cutting Edge - English

* Los Angeles Times - December 2, 2007
Live from downtown L.A.
Skid row converses with the rest of the neighborhood in Los Angeles Poverty Department's 'Utopia/Dystopia.'
By Zachary Pincus-Roth, Special to The Times
Los Angeles Times 2007 

* Back Stage - New York, NY,USA - November 30, 2007
L.A. Poverty Department Stages 'Utopia'
By Nicole Kristal
Backstage  

* NEW ANGELES - December 6, 2007
THE OTHER LAPD
Our realest theater yet reveals skid row's humanity in 'UTOPIA/dystopia' at REDCAT
By PAMELA MILLER-MACIAS
New Angeles

* NY DAILY NEWS - February 1, 2008
Local ex-addicts key assets in play about war on drugs
by Jotham Sederstrom
New York Daily News