Penny Arcade (born Susana Carmen Ventura, July 15, 1950) is an American performance artist, actress, and playwright based in New York City. She is known for her comedic wit, forthright delivery, and stage presence. Her performances explore topics such as gentrification, humanity, womanhood, LGBT culture, nostalgia, family history, and the life of the outsider. Additionally, Arcade is known for her association with underground arts and culture. On April 14, 2026, she was named a Guggenheim Fellow.

Early years

Susana Ventura was born in New Britain, Connecticut, and grew up in a working class Italian immigrant family. Her father fell ill from a severe beating he endured at Ellis Island in 1946, and in 1953 he was committed to Connecticut Valley Hospital in Middletown, Connecticut. He died there 12 years later of a heart attack at age 50. Arcade and her three siblings were raised by Arcade's mother, who worked as a seamstress in local sweatshops. The family was presided over by her maternal grandparents, both born in the 19th century in a remote Southern Italian village of Picerno, Basilicata.

As a child, Arcade did not plan to become a performance artist. In her working-class Italian-American family, there "just wasn't a format for that," she explained.

Of her early social experiences, Arcade described, "I was perceived to be this girl that everyone had slept with when I was 12 -- no one anyone knew, but they had heard." At age 13, she ran away from home and spent 4 weeks homeless in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. During this time, she was brought to juvenile court and sentenced to two years at the Sacred Heart Academy for Wayward Girls, a reform school run by the semi-cloistered Sisters Of The Good Shepherd. It was there that Arcade wrote her first play at age 14. At age 16, Arcade left home and spent the summer of 1967 homeless in Provincetown, Massachusetts, before ultimately moving to New York City.

Early career

Arcade adopted the name "Penny Arcade" after an LSD trip with her mentor Jamie Andrews,

Ventura's association with avant-garde performance began at age 17, when she became a member of John Vaccaro's Playhouse of the Ridiculous. While You Were Out then moved to University of The Streets in November 1985 and continued to run for an additional four months.

Arcade was featured in 1988 Vogue Magazines "People Are Talking About" issue, the first mention of performance art in a national fashion magazine. In the late 1980s, she created a character named Margo Howard-Howard, a 50-year-old drag queen with a scandalous past, for her performances. The New York Times refers to the character as "patently unbelievable", but in a later article acknowledges that her monologue was "based on real Lower East Side residents." Howard-Howard received an obituary in The Village Voice.

thumb|right|The Village Gate Sign on the corner of [[Thompson Street (Manhattan)|Thompson and Bleecker streets, January 2006]]

Premiering in 1990 at Performance Space 122, and running off broadway at The Village Gate 1992-1993 Arcade began touring internationally in 1993 with her most presented show, Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!, an opinionated commentary on sexuality and censorship that features a chorus of professional erotic dancers and strippers which created the international neo performance burlesque movement In 1998 she performed at the first Gay Shame event at DUMBA in Brooklyn; she appears in the documentary film of the event by Scott Berry, entitled Gay Shame '98.

She co-starred with Quentin Crisp in the long-running performance/interview piece, The Last Will and Testament of Quentin Crisp

Arcade's 2002 performance New York Values, which also toured abroad, addressed the loss of cultural identity in New York during the Giuliani years. The Village Gate marquee in New York is still adorned with her name and the title of her performance piece Politics, Sex & Reality, although the nightclub no longer exists.

Arcade is a co-founder of the Lower East Side Biography Project, "Stemming The Tide Of Cultural Amnesia, with long time collaborator Steve Zehentner, a video production and oral history that began as a workshop that trains participants in documentary filmmaking and preserves the stories of Lower Manhattan artists and activists. profiled individuals have included Judith Malina, Lee Breuer, Tom O'Horgan, Sarah Schulman, Betty Dodson, Quentin Crisp, ], Jayne County,Danny Fields and Marty Matz, among others.

In 2002 Arcade ran for the New York State Assembly as a candidate of the Green Party. She received 1,054 votes out of 32,976 in the 74th Assembly district, losing to incumbent and anti-rent control advocate Steven Sanders.

In January 2011 Arcade had an on-stage spat with performance artist Ann Liv Young while she was hosting an evening of performances and Young refused to respect the artists who were waiting to take their turn on stage .

In 2012 she took up residence at London's Arcola Theatre for a 22 performance run of her show Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore! which went on to run for 48 performances in London with 48 standing ovations.

In 2013 Arcade starred along with Mink Stole in a revival of Tennessee Williams one-act play, The Mutilated. The production was directed by Cosmin Chivu with music by Jesse Selengut, and previewed at the eighth annual Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival in Massachusetts, prior to its six-week run in New York at the New Ohio Theatre in the West Village where it was nominated for a Drama League Award as Best Revival.

Personal life

Arcade has been married three times. Her third marriage in 1998 was to singer-writer-composer Chris Rael, with whom she collaborated artistically. The couple lived together until January 2008. Arcade is bisexual.