Malpede is a director, performance artist / actor, and writer who has collaborated with dancers, poets, videographers, painters and architects, and has taught at UCLA Dept. Dance / World Arts and Cultures, NYU Tisch School of the Arts -Dept. Undergraduate Drama, and The Amsterdam School for Advanced Research in Theater and Dance (DasArts)-MFA Director's Program.

His individual artist fellowships include new genre grants from New York State Council on the Arts, NEA, and California Arts Council, and a 2008 COLA fellowship from the City of Los Angeles. He founded the Los Angeles Poverty Department in 1985. He has received a Dance Theater Workshop's (NYC) Bessie Creation Award, San Francisco Art Institute's Adeline Kent Award and a Durfee Sabbatical Grant for his work with Los Angeles Poverty Department. He has been featured in five video works by Bill Viola.

In 2002-05 he performed as Antonin Artaud in Peter Sellars’ production of Artaud’s For an End to the Judgment of God, in Vienna, Rome, London, Brussels, San Francisco and Los Angeles. In 2004, he directed “RFK in EKY” a site-specific regional recreation of Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 inquiry into poverty in Appalachia. He is a 2008 fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, where he is developing a project on intellectual property.