KATHERINE BAHENA-BENITEZ (Brooklyn, NY)
FELLOW | PERFORMANCE

Katherine Bahena-Benitez (They/Them) is a Queer Mexican Indigenous actor, poet, playwright, director and model. Katherine is bicoastal with New York and California. Katherine has performed and trained at The Juilliard School, Tectonic Theater, the American Conservatory Theater, 24 Hour Plays, the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, CSUS, La Mama Experimental Theater Club, Teatro Espejo and Broadway Advocacy Coalition at Columbia University. Katherine has been featured in Vogue, Remezcla, Netflix, Fenty, VoyageATL, Chillhouse and Apostrophes Magazine ‘De La Tierra’. Katherine has had their poems American Dream, La Morena, and Yo Ya No Rezo published with Museum Guild. Katherine is a Miranda Family Fellow, a LORT Fellow, an EmergeNyc Artist and recipient of the John Cauble Emerging Arts Leader Award. Fall 2023, Katherine's solo piece JOTA will be in development with Dramatic Question Theater (to be performed 2024). Fall 2023 they will be part of the Professional Development Program with SDCF for Emerging Directors. Katherine says, “con mucho amor y cariño, I do this for our gente, I do this for us. Aquí estamos.” For more, please visit: https://linktr.ee/Katherinebenitez

EVA YAA ASANTEWAA (New York, NY)
MENTOR | PERFORMANCE

Eva Yaa Asantewaa (she/her) was born in New York of Barbadian immigrant heritage and lives in Lenapehoking/East Village. A veteran writer, editor, curator and community educator, she won the 2017 Bessie Award for Outstanding Service to the Field of Dance. Since 1976, she has contributed dance criticism and journalism to Dance Magazine, The Village Voice, and other publications including her blog, InfiniteBody. She podcasts at Body and Soul. In 2016, for Danspace Project’s Lost and Found platform, Ms. Yaa Asantewaa created the skeleton architecture, or the future of our worlds, an evening of group improvisation by 21 Black women and gender-nonconforming performers. That cast won a 2017 Bessie for Outstanding Performer. In 2018, Queer|Art named one of its awards in her honor, the Eva Yaa Asantewaa Grant for Queer Women(+) Dance Artists. She is Founding Director of Black Diaspora and founder of Black Curators in Dance and Performance. From 2018-2021, Ms. Yaa Asantewaa served as Senior Director of Curation as well as Editorial Director at Gibney.

KELINDAH BEE (Brooklyn, NY)
FELLOW | LITERATURE

Kelindah bee (t[he]y/them) is a drag artist known as Theydy Bedbug, a spoken-word poet, an educator, and a producer. Their art, like their gender, beyond binaries and disciplines, is a collage of campy drag, grotesque burlesque and narrative poetry that unpacks daddy issues and reclaims transmasculine reproductivity through a queerly f@ggy sensibility. They grew up in Jakarta, Indonesia and Singapore and graduated from Vassar College in 2015. In 2019 they won the title of “Mx. Brooklyn” in a drag competition formerly, prior to their win, known as Mr(s). Brooklyn. They are the founder and facilitator of “Drag Performance: Between and Beyond Gender,” a biannual program at BAX which guides emerging drag artists to develop a persona and build an act as a tool of transformation, empowerment, and community connection. Through events they produce and workshops they teach, they foster spaces for artists of all ages to welcome our whole selves to be present, access pleasure, and express new ways of being: a pathway to new-world building. https://www.kelindahbee.art/ | @theydy.bedbug

KATE BORNSTEIN (Middletown, RI)
MENTOR | LITERATURE

Since the mid 1980s, Kate Bornstein has been writing about nonbinary gender in theory, fiction, and memoir. Kate is a trans elder whose art and activism have been in service to gender anarchy, and sex positivity. Kate’s books, Gender Outlaw, My New Gender Workbook, and A Queer and Pleasant Danger are taught in colleges and high schools. Her collected papers are archived and available for research at Brown University, alongside the archived papers of Kate’s partner in life and art, Barbara Carrellas. Kate has been crisscrossing North America and Europe with solo performances, lectures, and workshops for over 30 years. A darling of 90’s tv talk shows, Kate was an audience favorite series regular on E! Tv’s reality show, I Am Cait. She maintains a career in theater, making their Broadway debut in the summer of 2018, and more recently appearing in a recurring role on NBC’s The Blacklist. Kate is a co-founder of and advisor to Island Queers, a support group for LGBTQ+ youth and young adults on Rhode Island’s south shore. She is currently writing fables, fairy tales, nursery rhymes, and fan fiction screenplays in collaboration with the artificial intelligence entities, GPT-4 and Pi.

GRACE BYRON (Brooklyn, NY)
FELLOW | LITERATURE

Grace Byron (she/her) is a writer from the Midwest based in Queens. Her writing has appeared in The Cut, The Baffler, and Artforum among other outlets. Find her @emotrophywife.

JACKIE ESS (Brooklyn, NY)
MENTOR | LITERATURE

Jackie Ess (she/her) is a writer, novelist, and the author of Darryl (Clash, 2021). A co-founder of the Bay Area Trans Writers Workshop, her work can be found in Heavy Feather Review, the Zahir, the New Inquiry, Vetch, and the anthology We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics. Other than that, she's making some effort to be a nice person.

OSCAR DIAZ (Brooklyn, NY)
FELLOW | VISUAL ART

Oscar Diaz (they/them) is a queer & trans non-binary artist from the borderlands of Tijuana, Mexico and San Diego, California. Their work documents queer and trans communities as they experience joy and resistance, detailing divine gestures and unholy rituals that inform expansive ways of being. As a socially-engaged artist, they regularly produce multimedia & public programming to uplift communities from the margins. Most recently as executive producer of TRANSMISSION, NYC’s first trans music festival, as well as former organizer of Body Hack, an international mutual aid collective. Their community-based practice ties visual art and cultural production as a conduit for worldmaking that disrupts dominant narratives and rejects the notion that the present is enough.

DEMIAN DINÉYAZHI’ (Portland, OR)
MENTOR | VISUAL ART

Demian DinéYazhi´ is an Indigenous Diné Non-Binary Trans transdisciplinary artist born to the clans Naasht’ézhí Tábaahá (Zuni Clan Water’s Edge) and Tódích’íí’nii (Bitter Water) living in Portland, OR. They received their BFA in Intermedia Arts from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2014, where they were awarded the Thesis Writing Award and the Intermedia Arts Department award for their curatorial project, Bury My Art At Wounded Knee: Blood and Guts in the Art School Industrial Complex. They are the founder of R.I.S.E.: Radical Indigenous Survivance & Empowerment, an activist initiative dedicated to the education and amplification of Indigenous art and culture. DinéYazhi´ is the founder of the Indigenous artist/activist initiative, R.I.S.E.: Radical Indigenous Survivance & Empowerment. They have recently exhibited at Portland Biennial, Honolulu Biennial, Biennale of Sydney, Vielmetter Los Angeles, Wexner Center for the Arts, Whitney Museum of American Art, Henry Art Gallery, Pioneer Works, CANADA, NY; and Cooley Art Gallery. They are the recipient of the Henry Art Museum’s Brink Award, Hallie Ford Fellow in the Visual Arts, and Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellow. DinéYazhi´ is the author of Ancestral Memory, An Infected Sunset, and We Left Them Nothing.

SHULI HUANG (Jersey City, NJ)
FELLOW | FILM

Shuli Huang is a writer-director and cinematographer, born in Wenzhou, China. His latest short film, Will You Look At Me, premiered at the 61st Semaine de la Critique where it was awarded Queer Palm of Festival de Cannes 2022, and later took home Short Film Jury Award at Sundance Film Festival 2023. Farewell, My Hometown, the first feature film he lensed won the New Currents Award at the 26th Busan International Film Festival in 2021. Shuli holds a BFA in cinematography from the Beijing Film Academy. In 2019, he moved to New York City as an MFA candidate for the graduate film program at NYU.

IRA SACHS (New York, NY)
MENTOR | FILM

Ira Sachs was born in 1965 in Memphis, Tennessee. His feature films include Passages, Frankie (Cannes, 2019), Little Men (Grand Prix, 2016 Deauville American Film Festival), Love is Strange, Keep the Lights On (Teddy Award, 2012 Berlinale), Forty Shades of Blue (Grand Jury Prize, 2005 Sundance) and his first feature, The Delta. A 2013 Guggenheim Fellow, as well as an artist resident at Yaddo and MacDowell, Sachs's films are part of the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum and MoMA. A longtime Advisor at the Sundance Writers and Directors Labs, Sachs founded Queer|Art in 2009 and is an active member of the Queer|Art Board of Directors.

HAZEL KATZ (Altadena, CA)
FELLOW | FILM

Hazel Katz is a Los Angeles-based video artist and filmmaker. Her 2023 short narrative film, SYDNEY & KIM, will premiere this winter and her feature length documentary FLORIDA WATER is now distributed by Collective Eye Films. Hazel’s work has been supported by ICA San Diego, MOMA PS1, and festivals internationally. Hazel has attended residencies at UnionDocs, Abrons Art Center, and Acre, and she completed an MFA in Visual Art at UC San Diego.

STEPHEN WINTER (Brooklyn, NY)
MENTOR | FILM

Stephen Winter’s debut feature film Chocolate Babies (1996) premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and won awards at Frameline, SXSW, UrbanWorld and OutFest. It is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel. Stephen’s second feature Jason and Shirley (2015) was called “one of the year’s finest” by Richard Brody (The New Yorker) and played AGO in Toronto and MoMA in New York. Stephen produced the landmark documentary Tarnation (2004, Jonathan Caouette). Other film collaborations include Lee Daniels, Allen Hughes, Xan Cassavetes, Howard Gertler and John Cameron Mitchell. Stephen co-created and directed the pioneering 2018 afro-futuristic satire “Adventures in New America,” which the New York Times  compared to Boots Riley and Jordan Peele, He wrote the Spotify documentary Sound Barrier: Sylvester and directed the upcoming science-fiction drama The Space Within for Audible and Topic Studios starring Jessica Chastain, Ellen Burstyn, Michael Shannon, Bobby Canavale, Shea Whigham and Carmen Ejogo.

X. LEE (San Jose, CA)
FELLOW | PERFORMANCE

X. LEE (he/him) is an experimental sound art performer/composer with roots in scratch turntablism, jungle, techno, noise and electro-acoustic contemporary composition. His work draws from his experience in underground electronic subcultures. Through integrating interactive technologies and multimedia elements, he aims to explore design in physical and auditory space. His works have won multiple awards, and have had premieres with institutions such as National Sawdust, Open Bushwick Studios, JACK Quartet in NYC, Piccolo Teatro di Milano and La Biennale di Venezia. He has also been featured on several notable radio shows and press, including NTS live Radioshow: “TAFELMUSIK”, Rai 3 Radio, BBC radio. and DJMAGITALIA.

M. LAMAR (Brooklyn, NY)
MENTOR | PERFORMANCE

M. Lamar is a composer who works across opera, metal, performance, video, sculpture and installation to craft sprawling narratives of radical becoming. Lamar holds a BFA from The San Francisco Art Institute and attended the Yale School of Art, sculpture program, before dropping out to pursue music. Lamar’s work has been presented internationally, most recently at The Rewire Festival in The Hague, Trauma Bar Berlin, Atrium na Žižkově Prague, The Manhattan School of Music, Wellcome Collection London, The Cloisters at The Metropolitan Museum Of Art, Funkhaus Berlin Germany, Kunstgebäude Stuttgart, The Meet Factory in Prague, among others.

CHRISTOPHER PAUL JORDAN (Tacoma, WA)
FELLOW | VISUAL ART

Christopher Paul Jordan is a painter and public artist from Tacoma, Washington. Lacing salvaged materials such as window screens and debris netting with acrylic paint, Jordan simulates conditions of removal and relocation to surface questions about human relationships. Through parallel practices in performance, installation, and sculpture, his investigations are often staged or permanently embedded in public space. Jordan’s first museum exhibition: In The Interim - Ritual Ground for a Future Black Archive, buries African American predictions of the end of the world on the grounds of the Frye Art Museum until the year 2123. His 20ft bronze, aluminum, and steel sculpture andimgonnamisseverybody (2021) is the centerpiece for The AIDS Memorial Pathway in Seattle. Jordan holds an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art (2023).

AVRAM FINKELSTEIN (Brooklyn, NY)
MENTOR | VISUAL ART

Avram Finkelstein is an artist and writer, and a founding member of the Silence=Death and Gran Fury collectives. His work has shown at MoMA, the Whitney Museum, the New Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, David Zwirner, the Shed, the Museum of the City of New York, Kunsthal KAdE, and the Migros Museum, and is in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Whitney, the New Museum, the Metropolitan, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum. He is featured in the artist oral history project at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, and his book for UC Press, After Silence: A History of AIDS Through its Images, was nominated for an International Center Of Photography 2018 Infinity Award in Critical Writing and Research. He has written for BOMB, frieze, Art21, and Foam, been interviewed by The New York Times, frieze, Artforum, NPR, Slate, and Interview, and spoken at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, and NYU.