Diane Lefer is a playwright, author, and activist. In addition to her theatrical collaborations with Hector Aristizabal and their co-authored book, The Blessing Next to the Wound, her works for the stage have been produced in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and both Carolinas. Her most recent short-story collection, California Transit, was awarded the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. The Los Angeles Times review said, “It’s easy to see why a judge would want to honor these stories. They are smart, well written and have that most elusive of qualities: vitality. They take on difficult issues — immigration, racism, torture, animal suffering, environmental degradation. That makes her stories sound humorless; they aren’t. A vein of wry wit runs through them.”

Diane taught for 23 years in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She leads arts workshops with adjudicated youth to encourage self-expression and boost literacy. At Peace Camp 2010, she gave high school and college student activists a crash course in street theatre. In her own longrunning street performance, Diane rides buses and walks around Los Angeles and other cities dressed as a Guantanamo prisoner to be an unavoidable visual reminder of the criminal actions of the US government. Some people avoided her, some thanked her, blessed her, some cursed her. But everyone got the message until the day she was mistaken for a terrorist and found herself with both hands in the air and two guns pointed at her head. A few days later, she was apprehended by four Los Angeles police officers. Photographer Robin Lynne Gibson witnessed the incident and suggested it might be safer to take the protest off the streets and into the studio–resulting in the above image.

Photo by Robin Lynne Gibson