J. BOUEY
FELLOW | PERFORMANCE

J. Bouey is a Dance Artist. They received a BFA in Dance from Arizona State University, and J. is a current performer and collaborator with Christal Brown’s INSPIRIT Dance Company and AntonioBrownDance and performs for Germaul Barnes’ Viwesic Dance. J. Bouey is currently a Movement Research Van Lier Emerging Artist of Color Fellow for 2018 and BAX Fall Space Grantee. J. was also a Dancing While Black Fellow for 2017-2018, Gibney WorkUp 4.0 Artists in Residence, and has performed with Elisa Monte Dance as an apprentice from 2015 to 2017. J. has shown their original work at Movement Research at Judson Church, Gibney Dance, BAAD!, CPR – Center for Performance Research as a 2017 Chez Bushwick Artist in Residence, La Mama Experimental Theatre and South Mountain Center for Performing Arts.

DAVID THOMSON
MENTOR | PERFORMANCE

David Thomson, a native New Yorker, has primarily worked as a collaborative performer/creator in the fields of music, dance, theater, and performance with such artists as Bebe Miller, Trisha Brown (‘87-‘93), Susan Rethorst, Alain Buffard, Marina Abramovíc, Ralph Lemon, Yvonne Rainer, and Maria Hassabi among many others. His work has been presented and supported by The Kitchen, Danspace Project at St Mark’s Church, Dance Theater Workshop, Movement Research at Judson Church, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Gibney Dance Center, LMCC, PSNY, and The Invisible Dog. Thomson is a Bessie Award-winning artist for Sustained Achievement (2001), a 2012 US Artist Ford Fellow, a NYFA Fellow in Choreography, and a Yaddo, MacDowell and Rauschenberg Fellow. He holds a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from SUNY Purchase.

CANDYSTORE
FELLOW | VISUAL ART

Candystore is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and performer from San Jose, CA.  Shimmers writing and art have appeared in Paper Magazine, Riot of Perfume, Phile Magazine, RFD, Mesmer, Hand Job Zine, and others. She-he has performed at Club Cumming, The AC Institute, Situations gallery, LaMama Galleria, Dixon Place, Powrplnt, and every time she-he uses a public restroom. Candystore lives in Brooklyn, NY.

C. FINLEY
MENTOR | VISUAL ART

C. Finley is the curator of the Whitney Houston Biennial, which recently completed its second iteration. As an artist, Finley is known for her elaborate geometric paintings, skillful use of color, and her activism through street art. Previous projects include Wallpapered Dumpsters which has been featured in the New York Times, La Repubblica, the Huffington Post, NYLON Magazine, Dazed, and Women’s Wear Daily. As a member of the artist collective HowDoYouSayYamInAfrican?, she participated in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Finley received her BFA from the Pratt Institute, New York and her MFA from California State University, Long Beach. http://iamfinley.com/  

DANIEL CHEW
FELLOW | FILM

Daniel Chew is an artist who often works collaboratively, with Micaela Durand in film and Tin Nguyen in fashion, to create and discover queer moments of community. He has a forthcoming performance at the Stedelijk Muesum as CFGNY with Tin Nguyen and has also shown at MoMA PS1, 47 Canal, and White Columns among many other institutions. He is the recipient of a 2014 Rhizome Commission with Micaela Durand and is the Fall 2018 BijlmAIR resident in Amsterdam with Tin Nguyen. He graduated with a BFA in Film and Television from the Tisch School of the Arts in 2010.

FRÉDÉRIC TCHENG
MENTOR | FILM

Frédéric Tcheng is a civil engineer turned filmmaker. Originally from France, he holds an MFA in Film Directing from Columbia University. He co-produced and co-edited Valentino: The Last Emperor, the 2009 hit shortlisted for Best Documentary Oscar. He is the co-director of Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel, a Samuel Goldwyn release. Dior and I, his directorial debut, was released internationally in 2015 to critical and public acclaim. Tcheng is also a cinematographer and an editor on several projects. He is currently developing fiction projects and directing documentaries.

XANDRA CLARK
FELLOW | PERFORMANCE

Xandra Clark is an actor, writer, creator, documentary performance-maker, and all-around storyteller whose work explores multiplicity, ambiguity, and the struggle to define self and other. Her work has been featured at The Tank, Weeksville Heritage Center, Five Myles, Judson Church, Queer Abstract, Caveat, and Brooklyn College, among others, and been funded by NYSCA/Brooklyn Arts Council, Brooklyn Community Foundation, and Stanford Alumni Arts. She founded and hosts performance series The Green Room and co-created popular podcast True Story. Xandra is a company member of The Bats at The Flea and Poetic Theater Productions, is 2018-19 co-leader of Colt Coeur’s theater education initiative, and received the 2013 General Oliver P. Smith Award for Local Reporting from the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation. BA Theater, MA Journalism: Stanford University.

MASHUQ MUSHTAQ DEEN
MENTOR | PERFORMANCE

Mashuq Mushtaq Deen is an award-winning, queer theater artist and a resident playwright at New Dramatists (class of 2022). His newest production “Draw the Circle” performed at Mosaic Theater and Rattlestick Theater. He is a MacDowell Colony's Arch and Bruce Brown Fellow (2015-16), and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow. About his work, Deen says, "I look at work with a queer lens, thinking about intersections of sexuality, gender, race, class, etc. I seek to confront inequalities of both power and dignity, challenging and complicating notions of right and wrong, of my side and your side, of self and other. I want to question assumed values, especially my own. I am particularly interested in the heroic journeys of the heart." Deen is also an activist in the LGBTQ community.

SARAH MIHARA CREAGEN
FELLOW | VISUAL ART

Born in Nova Scotia, Sarah Mihara Creagen is an artist currently living in Brooklyn, New York. She attended university at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (Halifax), Concordia (Montreal), and The Ontario College of Art and Design (Toronto), receiving her BFA in 2012. Creagen received her MFA from Hunter College in 2018. She attended the Vermont Studio Center in 2013 on a partial fellowship, and was the recipient of a Kossak Travel grant in 2018 which enabled her to travel to Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Kyoto. She has exhibited work in Toronto and New York.

NEIL GOLDBERG
MENTOR | VISUAL ART

Neil Goldberg makes video, photo, mixed media, and performance work that focuses on embodiment, sensing, mortality and the everyday. This work has been exhibited at venues including The Museum of Modern Art (permanent collection), The New Museum of Contemporary Art, The Museum of the City of New York, The Kitchen, and The Hammer Museum. Neil has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony, among others. He teaches at the Yale School of Art and Parsons, was resident faculty at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and has served as a visiting artist at Cooper Union, SVA, NYU, RISD, the MIT Media Lab, UCLA, and elsewhere.    

CRISTÓBAL GUERRA
FELLOW | LITERATURE

Cristóbal Guerra is a writer and filmmaker from San Juan, PR currently based in New York. His work combines experimental video pieces, documentary form and written word to explore ideas of home, memory, "el caribe" and queerness. He was a 2017 Culture Push Fellow, a 2018 Resident at ACRE and has exhibited work with Fuerza Fest, Little Berlin Gallery, NY Immigration Coalition andThird Horizon Caribbean Film Festival.  

CHARLES RICE-GONZÁLEZ
MENTOR | LITERATURE

Charles Rice-González, born in Puerto Rico and reared in the Bronx, is a writer, long-time community and LGBT activist, co-founder of BAAD! The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance and a Distinguished Lecturer at Hostos Community College - CUNY. He received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Goddard College. His debut novel Chulito (Magnus Books 2011) has received nearly a dozen awards including a 2013 Stonewall Book Awards - Barbara Gittings Literature Award Honor from the American Library Association and a "Small Press Highlights" mention from the National Book Critics Circle. He co-edited with Charlie Vazquez, From Macho To Mariposa: New Gay Latino Fiction (Tincture/Lethe Press 2011). He is also the chair of the board for The Bronx Council on the Arts and The National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures.   

RUSSEL PERKINS
FELLOW | VISUAL ART

Russell Perkins makes work across media that aims to understand how economic imperatives register on the individual body. He received an MFA from Hunter College in 2018, where he was The Artist’s Institute’s Lazarus Curatorial Fellow. While at Hunter, he also conducted research in the archives of architect Lina Bo Bardi in São Paulo, Brazil with support from an Evelyn Kranes Kossak Travel Grant. His work is informed by two years studying philosophy at the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and a long term commitment to anti-prison activism as co-founder of Wesleyan University’s Center for Prison Education.

NANCY BROOKS BRODY
MENTOR | VISUAL ART

Nancy Brooks Brody is a visual artist, whose work spans across media and materials, including painting, drawing, sculpture, and more recently site specific interventions. Brody's practice engages with process, materiality and perception. Brody has exhibited consistently since the early 1980s. The first group exhibition she participated in was at Club 57, curated by Keith Haring. She has shown at many galleries and institutions, including New Math, Andrea Rosen, Exit Art, Virgil de Voldere, Shane Campbell, the Brooklyn Museum, White Columns, FRAC Haute Normandie, Galerie Joseph Tang, and Greater New York, MoMA PS1. Her work is in the permanent collections at MOCA, Los Angeles as well as Trafic FRAC Haute-Normandie, Rouen, France and Fonds National d'Art Contemporain, FNAC Paris, France. Committed to social justice and activism, she was a member of ACT UP and is a founding member of the collective, fierce pussy.

RIPLEY SOPRANO
FELLOW | LITERATURE

Ripley Soprano is an organizer and writer based in Brooklyn, New York. They have been organizing for over a decade around racial and economic justice issues. They co-founded New York 2 New Orleans Coalition (NY2NO), New York Students Rising, Youngist: young people-powered media, and the fundraising collective "Shadowbanned" that materially supports sex workers facing criminalization. They are an editor and co-owner of Mask Magazine, and are currently co-authoring a book on the social history of incest for TigerBee Press alongside Sophia Giovannitti. Ripley has been published in Mask, AlterNet, The Nation Magazine, the New York Times, and Salon.

CHE GOSSETT
MENTOR | LITERATURE

Che Gossett is a trans femme writer, an archivist at the Barnard Center for Research on Women and a PhD candidate in trans/gender studies at Rutgers. They are the recipient of the 2014 Gloria E. Ánzaldúa Award from the American Studies Association, a Radcliffe research grant from Harvard University, the 2014 Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from the Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies at the City University of New York, and the 2014 Martin Duberman Research Scholar Award from the New York Public Library. They are working on a book project titled Blackness, the Beast and the Non Sovereign and have been selected as a 2017 Palestine American Research Center Fellow for their project titled “Non-Sovereignties: Personhood and Interspecies Politics of Palestinian Struggle.”

NATALIE TSUI
FELLOW | FILM

Natalie Tsui (b. 1985, Hong Kong) is queer artist and filmmaker living and working in Brooklyn, CA. Their work investigates the links and ruptures between mass culture, collective memory, and personal narrative through a conceptual approach to visual storytelling. Tsui received a B.A. in Film Studies and English from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2008 and an M.F.A. in Cinema from San Francisco State University in 2014. Their work has been screened at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, Frameline, Museu de Arts Moderna of Rio de Janiero, Shapeshifters Cinema, Southern Exposure, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. They were the recipient of the Fotokem Graduate Student Grant and the Princess Grace Film Honorarium, among others. They were a 2018 Flaherty Seminar Fellow.

ELISABETH SUBRIN
MENTOR | FILM

Elisabeth Subrin is an award-winning writer, director and video artist. Her critically acclaimed first feature, A Woman, A Part was released theatrically in 2017. She has received grants and fellowships for her screenplays and films from The Rockefeller Foundation, The Guggenheim Foundation, The Annenberg Foundation, Creative Capital, The Westenberger Foundation, and The Andrea Frank Foundation. Subrin is also an internationally acclaimed video and installation artist whose work has been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Biennial, The Institute of Contemporary Art in London, The Guggenheim Museum, The Venice Viennale, and Harvard Film Archives, among others.

JEANNE VACCARO
FELLOW | CURATORIAL PRACTICE

Jeanne Vaccaro is a writer and curator. Her book in process, Handmade: Feelings and Textures of Transgender, explores the felt labor of making identity, and was awarded the Arts Writers Grant by Creative Capital / the Andy Warhol Foundation. Jeanne is the curator of Bring Your Own Body: transgender between archives and aesthetics, organized for the Cooper Union. She is co-founder of the NYC Trans Oral History Project, a community archive in partnership with the New York Public Library.

NELSON SANTOS
MENTOR | CURATORIAL PRACTICE

Nelson Santos is an artist, curator, designer, and the former Executive Director of Visual AIDS, a non-profit arts organization that utilizes art to fight AIDS and supports artists living with HIV/AIDS. While at Visual AIDS (2000-2017) he curated Video Positive, The Bronx Museum, NY; Go Figure, LGBT Center, NY; Robert Blanchon + Stephen Andrews, Miami Dade Art Gallery, FL; Between Ten, Spin Gallery, Toronto, and co-curated Sight of Constructions with Michael Gonzalez. Over the years, he has worked with hundreds of curators to help research, produce and organize museum, gallery and online exhibitions featuring Visual AIDS artist members.