BRIAN ALARCON
FELLOW | LITERATURE

Brian Alarcon is a multimedia writer, working with poetry across a variety of art forms. His experimental work deals with language as object and sound, while his prose explores the American identity through topics like immigration, sexuality, biraciality and fine art. A native New Yorker, he received his BFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College, with a concentration in Poetry under the close mentorship of Julie Agoos. Since, he has been active in the fine art world of Chelsea, where he has organized Salon-like gatherings with artists, salespeople and others from the community to encourage experimentation, collaboration, and transparency among them.

JAIME MANRIQUE
MENTOR | LITERATURE

Jaime Manrique is a bilingual Colombian-born novelist, essayist, translator, and poet. His first volume of poems received Colombia’s National Poetry Award. He’s also published the volumes of poetry My Night with Federico García Lorca and Tarzan, My Body, Christopher Columbus, and his Poemas selectos: El libro de los muertos (2017). He’s the author of the memoir Eminent Maricones: Arenas, Lorca, Puig, and Me. His novels include Latin Moon in Manhattan, Twilight at the Equator, Our Lives Are the Rivers, Cervantes Street, and Like this Afternoon Forever (2019). Mr. Manrique’s work has been translated into fifteen languages. Among his honors are a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, a grant from the Foundation of Performance of the Contemporary Arts, and the International Latino Book Award for Best Historical novel, 2007. He is a former associate professor in the MFA in Writing at Columbia University (2002-2008). Currently, he is a Distinguished Lecturer in the Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures at the City College of New York. In 2019, he received the Bill Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award from the Publishing Triangle.

ERICA CARDWELL
FELLOW | LITERATURE

Erica N. Cardwell is a Black queer writer, critic, and educator. Born on a full moon in Dayton, Ohio, Erica has been based in New York for nearly 20 years. Erica uses a Black feminist lens as her primary critical approach. She often writes about print, archival media, visual culture, and interdisciplinary performance. She is deeply fascinated with the imaginations of people of color, as a tool for social, spiritual, and collective movement. Erica has written for BOMB, The Believer, Brooklyn Rail, frieze, Hyperallergic, Passages North and other publications. Erica has been awarded residencies and fellowships from the Lambda Literary Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. She teaches writing and social justice at The New School, and received her MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College.

PAMELA SNEED
MENTOR | LITERATURE

Pamela Sneed is a poet, writer, performer, and visual artist, and is author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom than Slavery, KONG and Other Works, Sweet Dreams and two chaplets, Gift and Black Panther by Belladonna*. She has been featured in New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Art Forum, Hyperallergic and on the cover of New York Magazine. She serves as faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Low Residency MFA program teaching Human Rights and Writing Art and has been a visiting artist at SAIC for four consecutive years. She also teaches at Columbia University's School of Visual Arts, New Genres. She has performed at the Whitney Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Poetry Project, MCA, The High Line, New Museum and Toronto Biennale. She delivered the closing keynote for the Artists, Designers, Citizens Conference—a North American component of the Venice Biennale at SAIC. She appears in Nikki Giovanni’s “The 100 Best African American Poems.” In 2018, she was nominated for two PushCart Prizes in poetry. She will publish a poetry and prose manuscript Funeral Diva with City Lights in October 2020.

APRIL FREELY
FELLOW | LITERATURE

April Freely is a poet and essayist from Cleveland, Ohio. Her work has appeared in Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, and elsewhere. Her honors include a Tulsa Art Fellowship, winter fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, a Cave Canem Poetry Fellowship, and an Ohio Arts Council grant. She has been awarded residencies at Hedgebrook, Vermont Studio Center, and Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Her art writing was awarded a CUE Art Foundation Mentorship. She holds a BA from Brown University, and MFAs from the University of Iowa and New York University.

SAEED JONES
MENTOR | LITERATURE

Saeed Jones is a writer whose latest memoir, How We Fight for Our Lives, charts a course across the American landscape, drawing readers into the author’s boyhood and adolescence—into tumultuous relationships with his family, into passing flings with lovers, friends, and strangers. Each vignette builds into a larger examination of race and queerness, power and vulnerability, love and grief: a portrait of what we all do for one another—and to one another—as we fight to become ourselves. How We Fight for Our Lives won the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction and the 2020 Stonewall Book Award/Israel Fishman Non-fiction Award. Jones also wrote the poetry collection Prelude to Bruise, winner of the 2015 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry and the 2015 Stonewall Book Award/Barbara Gittings Literature Award. The poetry collection was also a finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as awards from Lambda Literary and the Publishing Triangle in 2015. He lives in Columbus, Ohio and tweets @TheFerocity.

MEV LUNA
FELLOW | FILM

Mev Luna is an interdisciplinary artist with a research-based practice that spans performance, video installation, new media, and text. Through a self-reflexive methodology, their work considers issues of institutional access, incarceration, and how images of marginalized bodies are circulated and controlled. Luna has exhibited at EXPO Chicago, Andrew Rafacz Gallery, and PRIZM Art Fair in Miami. Their time-based works have premiered at SFMOMA, Artists' Television Access, and MIX NYC Queer Experimental Film Festival. Luna was a 2018 Art Matters Foundation Fellowship recipient; 2018-2019 BOLT resident at the Chicago Artist Coalition and a 2017 SOMA Summer participant in Mexico City. They are currently a 2019-2021 AICAD Post-Graduate Teaching Fellow and Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art Practice at Parsons School of Design.

ANGELO MADSEN MINAX
MENTOR | FILM

Angelo Madsen Minax works in documentary and hybrid filmmaking formats, narrative cinema, experimental and essay film, sound and music performance, text, and media installation. Madsen's projects pull from autoethnography and a DIY ethos to think through chosen and biological kinships, cosmic, natural, and technological phenomena, and his favorite triple goddess: love, sex, and death. His works have screened and/or exhibited at spaces including the European Media Art Festival, Issue Project Room, Kurzfilm Hamburg, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Anthology Film Archives, the British Film Institute, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, REDCAT, and film festivals around the world. He has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Core Program, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Berlinale Doc Station, and others. Madsen is a recipient of the Samuel Edes Prize for Emerging Artists, the Tribeca Film Institute's All-Access Fellowship, the Sundance Film Institute's Documentary Production Fund, and the Bay Area Video Coalition’s Media-maker Fellowship. He is also an Assistant Professor of Time-Based Media at the University of Vermont.

JEFFREY MERIS
FELLOW | VISUAL ART

Jeffrey Meris is an artist born in Haiti in 1991 and raised in the Bahamas. Meris earned an A.A in Arts and Crafts from the College of The Bahamas, a B.F.A in Sculpture from Temple University, and an M.F.A in Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2019. Meris is a two-time Harry C. Moore Lyford Cay Foundation Scholar 2012 & 2017, Guttenberg Arts A.I.R 2016, a Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture 2019 alumnus, among other achievements. Meris has exhibited and spoken in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Vienna, Leipzig, Port au Prince and Nassau. Meris is currently a 2020 NXTHVN Studio Fellow.

CARLOS MOTTA
MENTOR | VISUAL ART

Carlos Motta’s multi-disciplinary art practice documents the social conditions and political struggles of sexual, gender, and ethnic minority communities in order to challenge dominant and normative discourses through visibility and self-representation. His work manifests in a variety of mediums including video, installation, sculpture, drawing, web-based projects, performance, and symposia. Motta’s 20-year career monograph Carlos Motta: History’s Backrooms will be published by SKIRA and distributed by DAP and Thames and Hudson in summer 2020.

NYALA MOON
FELLOW | FILM

Nyala Moon is an actor, writer, and filmmaker of trans experience. She is a graduate of Baruch College. Nyala is a New York native with southern roots. After working in the nonprofit community helping other transgender and queer people of color access affirming health care, Nyala took a leap of faith and pursued her passions for filmmaking. Nyala was also a contributor for the anthology, Written on the Body: Letters from Trans and Non-Binary Survivors of Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence by Lexi Bean. Nyala Moon has been touring college with her other anthology contributors speaking to college students about sexuality, gender identity, and sexual assault. In May 2020, Nyala graduated from City College with her MFA in film production.

RODRIGO BELLOTT
MENTOR | FILM

Rodrigo Bellott is a Bolivian filmmaker, playwright, and producer. Bellott’s Who Killed the White Llama? was the most successful box-office hit in Bolivia’s history, leading to Variety magazine naming him one of the Top Ten Latin American talents to watch in 2007. After receiving two masters degrees in screenwriting and directing at Binger Film Lab in Amsterdam in 2011, Bellott founded Bolivian BOLD Inc., a production company in New York City. At Queer|Art|Mentorship, Bellott worked with Mentor, filmmaker Silas Howard on the film adaptation of his play Tu Me Manques. Tu Me Manques, starring Oscar Martiniz and Rossy De Palma, premiered at Los Angeles’ Outfest in summer 2019 and was awarded the Grand Jury Prize for Best Original Screenplay. The film was also chosen by The Bolivian Filmmakers Association as the country's submission for the 2020 Oscars Best International Feature category.

JESS PRETTY
FELLOW | PERFORMANCE

jess pretty is on a quest for pleasure that transcends time and the spaces she claims to reside in. Within her research she choreographs, performs, collaborates with other artists (Okwui Okpokwasili, Kat Galasso, Will Rawls, Katie Workum, Cynthia Oliver, Leslie Cuyjet, Dianne McIntyre, Jennifer Monson and Niall jones) and has a teaching practice at universities around the country (The New School, Kent State University, Whitman College, Beloit College, and others) as well as NYC, where she moved after receiving an MFA in dance and queer studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Her free time is filled curating methodologies for living past survival through being as unapologetically Black as possible.

MORGAN BASSICHIS
MENTOR | PERFORMANCE

Morgan Bassichis is a comedian and musician who makes solo and collaborative performances that draw on historical archives, collective singing, and something like self-help. Recent shows include Nibbling the Hand that Feeds Me (Whitney Museum, NYC, 2019), Klezmer for Beginners (co-created with Ethan Philbrick, Abrons Arts Center, NYC, 2019), Damned If You Duet (featuring Malik Gaines, Helen Messineo-Pandjiris, Ethan Philbrick, and Mariana Valencia, The Kitchen, NYC, 2018), and The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions: The Musical (co-created with TM Davy, DonChristian Jones, Michi Ilona Osato, & Una Aya Osato, New Museum, NYC, 2017). Their year-long musical improvisation with Ethan Philbrick, March is For Marches, is available from Triple Canopy, and their live recording of More Protest Songs! at St. Mark's Church (featuring Kyle Combs, Elizabeth LoPiccolo, Sam Greenleaf Miller, and Rhys Ziemba) is available online.

NANDITA RAMAN
FELLOW | VISUAL ART

Nandita Raman is from Benaras, India and works with a range of mediums including photography, video, drawing and language. Her work has been exhibited at George Eastman Museum, Museum of Moving Images, Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University, and Columbia University. She has curated group exhibitions in New York and Varanasi. Her work has been written about in the New York Times, British Journal of Photography, the Hindu, and published in MIT Press’s Performance Art Journal and Documenta 14 volume titled South As A State Of Mind. She was 2017 Workspace Resident at Baxter St Camera Club of New York and is a recipient of Alkazi Foundation’s Documentary Photography Grant. Nandita is a graduate of the Bard College-International Center of Photography's MFA program and teaches photography at SUNY Purchase College.

MAIA CRUZ PALILEO
MENTOR | VISUAL ART

Migration and the permeable concept of home are constant themes in Maia Cruz Palileo’s paintings. Influenced by the oral history of her family’s arrival in the United States from the Philippines, as well as the history between the two countries, Maia infuses these narratives using both memory and imagination. Palileo has participated in residencies at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Lower East Side Print Shop, Millay Colony, and the Joan Mitchell Center. They have received an Art Matters Grant, Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Program Grant, NYFA Painting Fellowship, Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant, among others. Recent exhibitions include All the While I Thought You Had Received This, Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago; Maia Cruz Palileo, Katzen Museum, Washington, D.C.; The Way Back, Taymour Grahne, London; and Meandering Curves of a Creek, Pioneer Works, Brooklyn.

EVA REIGN
FELLOW | FILM

Eva Reign is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and actress originally from St. Louis, Missouri. She writes on topics pertaining to trans identity and culture with an emphasis on Black trans women and transfeminine people. Her performance work is a part of the permanent collections of both the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum. Her writing has been featured on platforms such as Teen Vogue and them. She currently works as Digital Media Manager of the Marsha P. Johnson Institute and as a columnist with them.

TOURMALINE
MENTOR | FILM

Tourmaline is an activist, filmmaker, and writer. Her work highlights the capacity of Black queer and trans people and communities to make and transform worlds. In her films, Tourmaline creates dreamlike portraits of people whose stories tell the history of New York City, including gay and trans liberation activists, drag queens, and queer icons Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera (Happy Birthday Marsha, co-directed with Sasha Wortzel, 2018), Miss Major (The Personal Things, 2016), and Egyptt LaBeija (Atlantic is a Sea of Bones, 2017). Recent screenings of Tourmaline’s work have been presented at venues including BFI Flare, London; Seattle Transgender Film Festival; Portland Art Museum; New Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Brooklyn Museum.

SURYA SWILLEY
FELLOW | PERFORMANCE

A native of Charlotte, North Carolina, Surya Swilley is a Summa Cum Laude graduate of Johnson C. Smith University where she received a BA in Dance and a BA in Communication Arts. Through a multilingual approach to movement, Swilley interrogates "choreographic protest" (via Susan Foster), and attempts to bring liberation and empowerment to her audiences. She has been honored to work and study under great artists including Candace Jennings, PJ Pennewell, Shani Collins, and LaTanya Johnson. She has performed with Lela Aisha Jones|FlyGround, Martha Connerton/Kinetic Works and Kariamu and Company. In addition to being a videographer, Swilley holds an MFA in dance from Temple University. She is the founder of The Swilley Brand, @swilley_ on Instagram, and is deeply invested in asking the questions that bring all Black lives liberation.

MARIA BAUMAN MORALES
MENTOR | PERFORMANCE

Maria Bauman-Morales is a “Bessie” award winning multi-disciplinary artist and community organizer based in Brooklyn, NY. She is 2020 Columbia College Dance Center Practitioner-in-Residence, 2019 Gibney Dance in Process residency award winner, 2018-20 UBW Choreographic Center Fellow, 2017-19 Artist in Residence at Brooklyn Arts Exchange and was the 2017 Community Action Artist in Residence at Gibney. In 2009 she founded MBDance which recently premiered (re)Source to sold-out audiences, co-commissioned by the Chocolate Factory Theater and BAAD!. She creates bold and intimate artworks for MBDance, via dream-mapping and nuanced, powerful physicality. Centering non-linear stories, bodies and musings of queer people of color, she draws on her studies of English literature, capoeira, improvisation, dancing in nightclubs and concert dance classes to emphasize ancestors, imagination, and Spirit while embodying inter-dependence. Bauman-Morales is a Core Trainer with The People's Institute for Survival and Beyond, helping arts organizations and university dance programs understand and undo racism. In 2014, she co-founded a grassroots organization, Artists Co-creating Real Equity, which won the 2018 BAX Arts and Artists in Progress Award for working to undo racism in our daily lives. Organizing to undo racism informs her artistic work and the two areas are each ropes in a double-dutch that is her holistic practice.