Florian Sauter is an Austrian architect and theorist. Together with Charlotte von Moos he is the co-founder of the architectural practice Sauter von Moos based in Basel and Miami. The studio engages in work on all scales, both in theory and practice. Sauter holds a Master and Ph.D. degree from ETH Zurich, where he also taught for many years. He was a Visiting Professor at TU Munich, Cornell AAP and workshop leader at Porto Academy. Sauter is the co-editor of Earth Water Air Fire: The Four Elements and Architecture and the author of Painting the Sky Black: Louis Kahn and the Architectonization of Nature.
Alberto Sarraín is a Cuban theater director, playwright, actor, and educator. He was born in Cuba in 1949. He graduated with a degree in psychology from La Universidad de La Habana in 1976. In 1979 he immigrated to the United States where he has worked and lived. He founded the Cuban Cultural Group, also known as La Má Teodora in 1996. He has taught theater, directed Cuban works, and been involved in festivals in the United States, Cuba, Spain, and other Latin American countries. He was the co-recipient of the 2001 PEN/Newman’s Own First Amendment Award, for leading a legal battle to allow the performances of Cuban plays in Florida.
Edgar Sarli has been a faculty member at the University of Miami, School of Architecture since 2009. He received a Masters of Architecture in Urban Design from Harvard University in 2003 and his Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Miami in 1999. After collaborating in the office of Rafael Moneo for five years, he founded Loeb Sarli Architects. The firm’s project-based research ranges from large-scale urban interventions to a collection of portable furniture for contemporary nomadic urbanites. The office has won awards in Switzerland and Spain, and its work has been featured in AV, Domus web, and NZZ. It has been exhibited in America and Europe, including the Architecture Biennale in Venice. Mr. Sarli is a Florida Registered Architect, and teaches Building Technology, Design, and Visual Representation.
Héctor Santiago Armenteros Ruiz is a versatile artist who was involved in theater in Cuba, before and after the Cuban Revolution, and in the United States. He worked as an actor, playwright, director, choreographer, dancer, and puppeteer. Santiago was born in Havana, Cuba in 1944. He graduated from the Cuban National Dramatist School after studying literature at the University of Havana. In 1959, he co-founded the Children’s Theatrical Movement in Cuba. The writer Virgilio Piñera was his intimate friend and his literature professor throughout those active years.
In 1965, Santiago was accused of antisocial behavior. Five years later he was arrested and his literary works seized by the government. The artist was sentenced to three years service in UMAP (Military Units to Aid Production), which was a type of Cuban forced labor camp where political dissidents were made to work in inhumane conditions. In 1979, he left Cuba for Spain. Santiago was eventually able to move to New York, where he resides today.
Santiago has been active in promoting HIV awareness in New York City. He has shown a strong desire to portray the social and human impacts of the disease, as it was a theme in his plays throughout the 1980s. He once said, “As a human being, I have tried to bring light to these dark times and unflaggingly struggled so that man does not become man’s wolf.”
Many of his plays have been performed in Cuba and in the United States. His short stories, essays, and plays have been published and translated into English, French and Catalan. His play Vida y Pasión de la Peregrina (Life and Passion of the Pilgrim) was the winner of the Golden Letters Award from the University of Florida, and the world premiere took place during the Miami International Theatre Festival in 1998.
Mario Santí was a Cuban sculptor born in Holguín province in 1911. He later moved to Havana and entered the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts where he graduated from Drawing and Painting and Drawing and Modelling in 1934. In 1935, when the Provincial Visual Arts School of Oriente was founded, he was appointed teacher of the Modelling Department of that school, where he taught for nine years. In 1943, through a process of competitive examinations, he became part of the faculty of the San Alejandro School. He exhibited his works in thirty national and foreign collective expositions and held three personal ones. His artistic triumphs include: First Prize, National Competition for executing a bust to poet José María Heredia in the city of Santiago de Cuba in 1939; First Prize in the National Competition to make a Monument to Mothers in the city of Cárdenas, 1945; First Prize for the Construction of a tomb worthy of José Martí, in the Santiago de Cuba cemetery, 1945; Second Prize in the Third National Exposition of the Ministry of Education of 1946 and First Prize in the Competition to build a Monument to Mothers in the city of Holguín.
