JAMES LUNA is a Payómkawichum (Luiseño) Indian and Mexican-American performance artist. His work is known internationally for challenging the ways in which conventional museum exhibitions depict Native Americans, and is often comedic and theatrical in nature. Luna has performed over 58 solo exhibitions since 1981, and has partaken in group exhibitions and projects around the world. In his 1987 "Artifact Piece" at the San Diego Museum of Man, Luna lay still in a display case filled with sand and other artifacts. In the early 1990s Luna stood outside of Washington D.C.'s Union Station and performed "Take a Picture With a Real Indian." In 2005, he was invited to appear at the famed Venice Biennale in Italy, and this year he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.In 2013, he appeared to a capacity audience at the Orange County Great Park in Native Stories: Life From the Colonia to the Rez, in which he recounted his childhood and teen years growing up in Orange County. Luna was born in 1950 in Orange, California and moved to the La Jolla Indian Reservation in 1975, where he lives today. In 1976, he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the University of California, Irvine, and he received in 1983 a MS in Education Counseling. In 2012, Luna was awarded an honorary PhD in Humanities from the Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe, NM.