Samuel Vasquez

Samuel Vasquez is the founder and director of the Performance Art Museum (PAM), the first museum dedicated to collecting, historicizing, and honoring performance art, launched in Los Angeles in 2023. A UCLA graduate and lifelong advocate for performance, Vasquez began in 2005 as co-founder of the Echo Park performance space Eighteen-Thirty before building a career in museum leadership: he held senior advancement roles at the Hammer Museum during the launch of Made in L.A. and its free-admission initiative, served as Deputy Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles during its 2017 opening, and returned to MOCA as Deputy Director of Advancement, where he helped establish the museum's performance program at Wonmi's Warehouse. He left MOCA in 2023 to pursue his vision of a permanent home for performance art — a form he describes as an orphan of the art world. Under his direction, PAM has launched programs including Los Angeles Performs Itself, performance series at the historic Catch One nightclub, artist residencies, and a multi-year initiative with the Getty Research Institute exploring the legacy of High Performance magazine, the pioneering LA journal that first chronicled the very movement this film documents.