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.

1. Los Angeles Downtown News 2001- LAPD Deploys Its "Agents & Assets'
2. New Times Los Angeles 2001- Community Theater
   
3. Los Angeles Weekly 2001 - Intinerary: The War on Drugs
4. Panorama 2002 - They're the LAPD, but their justice is done on the stage
5. Michigan Chronicle 2002 - L.A. group presents crack epidemic drama
6. Michigan Citizen 2002 - Drug war theme of new play
7. Plain Dealer 2004 - An in-depth look at U.S. drug war
8. Angle 2004 by Linda Eisenstein
9. KCRW 2005 - Agents & Assets: page 4+5
10. Los Angeles Times 2005 - For this LAPD, the weapons are words
11. Philadelphia Daily News 2006 - Troupe from the 'Hood
12. New York Daily News 2008 - Local ex-addicts key assets in play about war on drugs
13. Los Tiempos 2009 - Bolivia y EEUU juntos en 'Agentes y Activos'
14. Los Tiempos 2009 - Grupo teatral de EEUU critica política antidroga de su país.
15. Los Tiempos 2009 - Estrenan “Agentes y Activos” sobre la política de EEUU
16. La Patria, Oruro 2009 - Obra teatral 'Agentes Y Activos' se estrena hoy en Oruro
17. La Opinion 2009 - Función de teatro hoy en la Plaza Principal
18. Z Magazine 2009 - Fearful Symmetry in Bolivia
    

* Los Angeles Times - 2003 - His spotlight illuminates lives of the homeless / la Llorona, article by Sasha Anawalt

* The NC Charlotte Observer - 2006 - Homeless Tell Katrina's Stories by Julie York Coppens

* Belgium Press about LEGAL*ILLEGAL - March 2007:

• Nieuwpoort theater magazine - Daklozenregisseur uit LA maakt voorstelling in Gent
• De Standaard interview - ‘Wettelijkheid is een erg veranderlijk gegeven’
• De Standaard - Tussen Skid Row en de Roma
• Cutting Edge - Flemish -De grillige grens tussen wat mag en niet mag
  
• Cutting Edge - English - The Capricious Border Between What Can and Cannot Be 

* UTOPIA/dystopia / Skid Row History Museum - Dec. 2007/June 2008:

• Los Angeles Times - 2007 - Live from downtown L.A.
• Back Stage - 2007 - L.A. Poverty Department Stages Utopia
• NEW ANGELES - 2007- The Other LAPD
• Los Angeles Times 2008 - New exhibit about L.A.'s homeless opens Saturday at Chinatown

* French Press about RED BEARD / RED BEARD - April 2008:

• fluctuat.net - Les plaies du LAPD by Lucie Prost

• nouvelOBS.com - Un américain pas tranquille, a découvrir by Odile Quirot
• Nouvel OBS ENGLISH - Discovering an unquiet American

• Liberation - 'Red Beard, Red Beard' une humanité chorale by Rene Solis
• Liberation ENGLISH - 'Red Beard, Red Beard' a human choral