***RSVP is required for this event, RSVP here***
Join us for a fun, lit, and eclectic fireside reading from this year's current Queer|Art|Mentorship Literature Fellows: Raja Feather Kelly, María José Maldonado, and Sarah Zapata. This event will feature intimate portraits of each writer, their work and their process. Part performance, part interview, part talk show, and part party, this event promises to shed light on what it takes each artist to bring their ideas to the forefront of their mind, their pencils to the page, their fingers to the keys, and to realize their work in their own voices.
This event is funded in part by Poets & Writers with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
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This event is part of the 2019-2020 Queer|Art|Mentorship Annual Exhibition, curated by current Fellow Anthonywash.Rosado and titled ARCANUM, open from October 29, 2020 through January 7, 2021. The exhibition will present across multiple formats and locations, including a virtual gallery and public outdoor performances throughout New York City, new work by graduating Fellows of the 2019-2020 Queer|Art|Mentorship program: Brian Gonzalez, Patrick G. Lee, María José Maldonado, Felli Maynard, Olaiya Olayemi, Sarah Sanders, and Sarah Zapata. Learn more at https://www.queer-art.org/arcanum.
About Raja Feather Kelly
Raja Feather Kelly is a choreographer, director, and the artistic director of the feath3r theory and New Brooklyn Theatre. A two-time winner of the Princess Grace Award and awardee of a Creative Capital award (2019), Raja is the 2019-2020 Randjelovic/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist at New York Live Arts and an inaugural Jerome Hill Artist Fellow. Over the past decade, Kelly has created thirteen evening-length premieres and six short-format works as well as choreographing extensively for Off-Broadway theatre in New York City, garnering a Breakout Award from SDCF (2018).
About María José Maldonado
María José Maldonado is a Salvadoran-Ecuadorian queer writer, creator, performer, and comedian from Queens, NY. Her work explores queerness, resistance, and anger through speculative fiction, poetry, and comedic performance. Her writing has been featured on Autostraddle and she has performed at Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, Center for Book Arts, Settlement University, and Dixon Place. Currently, she’s working on her novel set in New York City about a queer Latinx woman who becomes a lovable serial killer of cisgender men. She’s a graduate of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art’s “Creative Writing from Queer Resistance” workshop, is a co-founder of “Streaks of Lavender” zine, and is launching a podcast focusing on women, trans and nonbinary folx’s rage called “I Killed A Man” in Fall 2019.
About Sarah Zapata
Sarah Zapata makes work with labor-intensive processes such as handweaving, rope coiling, latch hooking, and sewing by intersecting theories of gender and ethnicity with pre-colonial histories and techniques. Making work with meditative, mechanical means, her current work deals with the multiple facets of her complex identity: a Texan living in Brooklyn, a lesbian raised as an evangelical Christian, a first generation American of Latin American descent, a contemporary artist inspired by ancient civilizations, an artist challenging the history of craft as “women’s work” within the realm of art. Zapata’s work has been exhibited at the New Museum (NY), El Museo del Barrio (NY), Museum of Art and Design (NY), Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art (NY), Boston University (MA), LAXART (CA), amongst others.