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.

Bouey worked with performing artist Mentor David Thomson on The Space Between Words, a movement-based project seeking to address the inextricable connections between mental health issues and the toxic teachings of masculinity and patriarchy for Black Mascs in America.

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.

Candystore worked with Mentor, artist and curator C. Finley on a multifarious and performative book-length project about the deep South, queer sex, intimacy, and boundary-making in the digital age that will explore digital space as a kind of haven or safe(r) place to exist.

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.

Chew worked with Mentor, filmmaker Frédéric Tcheng on a narrative feature about a love triangle that forms between two siblings—brother and sister—and a mysterious stranger. The intimacies that form speak to dynamics of race, sexuality, gender, and privilege as they play out in a technologically saturated world.

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.

Clark worked with Mentor, theater artist and playwright Mashuq Mushtaq Deen on Polylogues, a verbatim interview-based solo show exploring real people’s anonymous experiences with queering the traditional relationship structure through nonmonogamy.

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.

Creagen worked with Mentor, visual artist Neil Goldberg on expanding a body of drawings and comics that explicitly explores her family’s mixed-race Japanese heritage and investigates areas of representation connected to women’s bodies in sex and sexual health.

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.

Guerra will be working with Mentor, writer Charles Rice-González on TropiColonia Studios, a piece that explores the idea of a post-liberation Puerto Rico through the lens of three queer characters in their late 20's.

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.

Perkins worked with Mentor, visual artist Nancy Brooks Brody on an installation that interprets the ambient sounds of slot machines and electronic games for a vocal ensemble. This project is part of a larger body of work that hopes to more deeply consider the space between speculation—the voluntary assumption of risk—and precarity as unwilled exposure to neoliberal financial hazards.

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.

Soprano worked with Mentor, writer and archivist Che Gossett on a nonfiction critical theory text that engages with the concept and reality of “celebrity” under late racial-capitalism to consider how it perpetuates the social ladder, toxic masculinity behavior, wealth accumulation, and public control of land and the masses.

Natalie Tsui (b. 1985, Hong Kong) is queer artist and filmmaker living and working in Brooklyn, CA. Her 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. Her 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. She was the recipient of the Fotokem Graduate Student Grant and the Princess Grace Film Honorarium, among others. She was a 2018 Flaherty Seminar Fellow.

Tsui worked with Mentor, filmmaker Elisabeth Subrin on if I could turn back time, an exploration of the limits of documentary evidence and the impossibility of recapturing memory through narrative.

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.

Vaccaro was the curator-in-residence during the 2018-2019 Queer|Art|Mentorship cycle and worked closely with Mentor, curator and artist Nelson Santos and Queer|Art staff to organize the 2018-2019 Queer|Art|Mentorship Annual exhibition.

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.

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

Justin Allen is a writer and performer from Northern Virginia. He has written for Mosaic Literary Magazine, Lambda Literary, ARTS.BLACK, and the Leslie-Lohman Museum's journal The Archive, among others. His work has been recognized by the Vera List Center for Arts and Politics, and he has read at the Whitney, Poetry Project, and Artists Space. In 2016 he presented at the International James Baldwin Conference at the American University of Paris.

Allen worked with Mentor Che Gossett on composing a collection of poems and developing a language that continues his sci-fi about a U.S. after Reparations.

Eames Armstrong (they/she) is an artist and curator who works with noise, interdisciplinary experimental performance, and queer theory. Eames received a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2010 and an MFA from the George Washington University in 2016. They're currently based in Brooklyn and work out of a studio at Silent Barn, but maintain a long-distance relationship with the Washington, D.C. area.

Armstrong worked with Mentor Margaret Ewing to curate the QAM Annual Exhibition as well as developing a project "Grimoire" that considers performance scores alongside texts for spell casting.

Cruz received a BFA in painting at Pratt Institute (1998) and a MFA from Yale University (2009). He attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and completed the AIM Program at the Bronx Museum in 2006. Recent residencies include the LMCC Workspace and Project For Empty Space’s Social Impact Residency. Notable group exhibitions include El Museo del Barrio, BRIC, Performa 13, and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. In 2013, Cruz was awarded fellowships with The Franklin Furnace Fund Award and The Urban Artist Initiative Award. Recent press includes The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, WhiteHot Magazine, W Magazine, Bomb Magazine, and El Centro Journal.

Cruz worked with Mentor Neil Goldberg to develop and expand on a series of drawings and an operatic-like performance based on ethnographic photographs and the Black Diaries by the British consul and Irish Nationalist, Roger Casement.

Marco DaSilva is a native New Yorker whose symbol-based paintings explore hybridity through the intersections of his Brazilian American, queer identity and manic experience. He has exhibited work at Apostrophe NYC, Heath Gallery and the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art. He is also a NYFA Artist as Entrepreneur Fellow. He lives and creates work at his studio in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Marco has a BFA in Painting and Drawing from SUNY New Paltz.

DaSilva worked with Mentor Liz Collins to work on a sculptural series which explores the manic experience through the notions of dreams of grandeur, opulence and excess across different socioeconomic perspectives.

Federica Gianni (1986, Rome) is an Italian filmmaker based in New York. She has made short films in the US and in Europe. Her work explores the different expressions of contemporary masculinity, and focuses on the struggle between belonging and otherness. The short film "The Friend from Tel Aviv" screened in major LGBT film festivals in the US and internationally, and won the DGA Award for "Best Student Film" in the women's category. Her latest short film "Primo" won the Adrienne Shelly Foundation Award for "Best Female Director" at the 30th Columbia University Film Festival.

Federica worked with Mentor Rose Troche to continue developing her first feature film "To the Moon On the Wings of a Pig" set in Rome. Set in a Pasolinian beach town in the outskirts of Rome, "To the Moon on the Wings of a Pig" is a queer coming of age story about first love, family and addiction.

Lucas Habte is an Ethiopian-American filmmaker living in New York City. He began making documentaries at Harvard University, in the Sensory Ethnography Lab with Lucien Castaing-Taylor. In the summer of 2010, he made a short documentary in Stockholm, "Harena," about a teenage Eritrean asylum seeker’s first two months living with her new Swedish host family. In 2011, Habte received the George Peabody Gardner Traveling Fellowship to work as a video and radio facilitator with Aboriginal people in the remote communities of the Australian outback. In 2014, he was awarded the Mortimer Hays-Brandeis Traveling Fellowship to Ethiopia. In Addis Ababa, he taught film in the Addis Ababa University School of Fine Arts’ MFA program and shot his first feature documentary, Shadow of His Wings. He is a 2017 Film Independent, TFI Network, and IFP Fellow.

Habte worked with Mentor Frédéric Tcheng to realize Shadow of His Wings, a documentary feature about Habte’s love story with a young man in Addis Ababa before and after he flees homophobic threats to become France’s first LGBT refugee from Ethiopia. Meanwhile, hoping for reconciliation, my estranged father returns to Ethiopia after 45 years of exile.

Lamya H is a queer Muslim writer living in New York City. Her work has appeared in Salon, VICE, Vox, Black Girl Dangerous, Autostraddle, and others. She was a Lambda Literary Fellow in 2015 and an Aspen Words Emerging Writers Fellow in 2016.

H worked with Mentor Naomi Jackson on memoirs on being a queer, brown, Muslim immigrant woman in the United States

At 14, Jarrett Key was a “scholarship kid” from rural Alabama, attending a predominately white high school in Georgia. At 18, they left the south to attend Brown University. Since moving to New York, Key has been featured in performances, biennales, residencies, publications, exhibitions, and workshops at NYU Tisch, galleries in Brooklyn, Chelsea, LES, Harlem, Boston, Ljubljana and Shanghai. Key’s work is in the collections of the Schomburg Center, MoMa Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Library, among other institutions. The HAIR PAINTING series has been featured at the Studio Museum in Harlem and Harlem Arts Festival in Marcus Garvey Park, as well on television: SLAY TV, and CBS 2 NYC.

Key worked with Mentor, artist David Thomson on a series of performance installations (hair paintings) reimagining the rituals, narratives and legacy of his grandmother, Ruth Mae “Polka Dot” Giles.

D’Angelo Madsen makes films, videos and multi-disciplinary projects inspired by the collective and individual politics of belonging, and considers where fantasy, desire and embodiment interfere. His works have shown at Anthology Film Archives (NYC), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), REDCAT (LA), the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the British Film Institute (UK), the European Media Art Festival (Germany) and numerous film and video festivals around the world. D’Angelo received an MFA from Northwestern University (2012), a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2005), and has attended residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2014), The Core Program (2012-2014), Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (2015), and the Berlinale DOC Station (2016).

D’Angelo Madsen worked with Mentor Kimberly Reed to realize a feature length hybrid documentary film to trace the story of his niece’s unexplained death, his brother-in-law’s false incarceration for her murder, and how his family’s turn to Mormonism poses conflicts for D’Angelo’s transgender identity.

Zander Schlacter is an interdisciplinary artist and designer living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Through writing, textile making, and performances of personal style, Schlacter’s work creates a queer intersection of textiles, gender, and intimacy. Schlacter’s work and personal style has been featured in Teen Vogue, BUST Magazine, Vogue Spain, Vogue Taiwan, and Metropolis Magazine, and Schlacter has collaborated with Print All Over Me and the Hong Kong-based brand Candies. In 2016, Schlacter received grant funding for an apparel-based, collaborative research project, which explores the aesthetic possibilities of a femme future. Schlacter received a BFA in Textiles from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2017.

Schlacter worked with Mentor C. Finley to construct a wardrobe for a drag king alter ego character, exploring the potential for a wardrobe to act as an alternative archive of gender and self-expression.

Moe Angelos is one of The Five Lesbian Brothers, who have written, performed, and published six plays. She has collaborated with the Builders Association as a performer and writer since 2000. She has been involved with the WOW Café for many years and has appeared in the work of many downtown luminaries including Carmelita Tropicana, Anne Bogart, Holly Hughes, Lois Weaver, Kate Stafford, Brooke O’Harra, Half Straddle and The Ridiculous Theatrical Company.

Liz Collins is an artist and designer who explores the boundaries between painting, fiber arts and installation. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Arts and Design, NY; the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, NY, in addition to numerous solo shows. Her awards include a United States Artist Target Fellowship, a MacColl Johnson Fellowship, and a CeCArtsLink Grant.

C. Finley is the curator of Whitney Houston Biennial, an exhibition of artwork by contemporary women artists, which recently completed its second iteration. Also an artist, Finley’s work has been shown internationally at Galerie Ernst Hilger, Vienna; Superchief Gallery Los Angeles; Jenn Singer Gallery New York; Context/Art Miami; and many other venues. As a member of the artist collective HowDoYouSayYamInAfrican?, she participated in the 2014 Whitney Biennial.

Neil Goldberg makes video, photo, mixed media and performance work that focuses on embodiment, mortality and the everyday. His work has been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art (permanent collection); New Museum; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum; The Hammer Museum; The Kitchen; The Pacific Film Archive; NGBK Kunsthalle Berlin and El Centro de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, among other venues.

Che Gossett is a 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. Anzaldúa Award from the American Studies Association, a Radcliffe research grant from Harvard University and 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.

Naomi Jackson is the author of The Star Side of Bird Hill. Star Side was nominated for an NAACP Image Award, longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award, and named an Honor Book for Fiction by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Jackson studied fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Kimberly Reed’s first feature-length documentary Prodigal Sons has screened at film festivals worldwide and received the FIPRESCI International Film Critics’ prize at the Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival. Her work has been featured for four consecutive years at IFP’s Independent Film Week, and she was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film.

Frédéric Tcheng is a civil engineer turned filmmaker and holds a MFA in Film Directing from Columbia University. He co-produced and co-edited Valentino: The Last Emperor, shortlisted for the Best Documentary Oscar in 2009, and is co-director of Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel. Dior and I, his directorial debut, was released internationally in 2015 to critical and public acclaim.

David Thomson is a collaborative performer/creator in the fields of music, dance, theater, and performance, and has worked with Mel Wong, Trisha Brown, David Roussève, Wendy Perron, Ralph Lemon, Yvonne Rainer, among many others. His own work has been presented by The Kitchen, Danspace Project, Dance Theater Workshop, Roulette, and Movement Research. Thomson has served on the faculties of Movement Research, NYU/Experimental Theater Wing, Sarah Lawrence, The New School, Barnard, and Pratt.

Rose Troche is a writer/director/producer of film, television and new media. Her career began with her debut feature, Go Fish which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1994. She has continued to work in film, television, and, most recently, Virtual Reality with three back to back debuts at Sundance (2015-17).

Chris Blue (Washington D.C. 1993) is an interdisciplinary audio-visual artist from Washington D.C. Blue graduated from NYU (BFA 2015) with interest in sculpture, physics, and blues history. Blue the co-founder of dggd (doggdays) production collective and was an artist in residence at Residency at McDonalds.

Blue worked with Mentor, multi-disciplinary artist Kimberly Mayhorn on a forthcoming film entitled suddendeath regarding Mozart's last universal and transcendental composition.

Jamal T. Lewis (b. 1990) is an emerging multidisciplinary artist, writer, and thought leader living in Bedstuy, Brooklyn, hailing from Atlanta, Georgia. Named by Teen Vogue as one of the "coolest queers on the internet," Lewis is also known as 'fatfemme', a moniker that encapsulates life at the intersection of fat and femme identity -- "spaces that people are afraid to occupy," she names. A graduate of Morehouse College and The New School, Lewis produces work around the body, specifically exploring and interrogating identity formation, race, gender, sexuality, desire, beauty, and ugliness. Lewis's work has been featured in LA Times, New York Times, TriBeca, & Tate Modern.

Lewis worked with Mentor, filmmaker Stephen Winter on a documentary entitled No Fats, No Femmes about desire, body image, and sexual racism.

Rodrigo Moreira is a Brazilian visual artist based in New York. He holds a BA in Graphic Design and Communication Studies with complementary studies in Fine Arts. His works are focused on communication and social issues. He has taken part in many exhibitions in Colombia, Cuba, Spain, South Korea, USA and Brazil.

Moreira worked with Mentor, artist/writer Avram Finkelstein on a project entitled NSA - No Strings Attached, documenting the immigrant experience in the U.S. and the relationships they establish with a different culture.

Anna Campbell is a visual artist whose work deconstructs otherwise legible signifiers of gender and heteronormativity using sculpture, site-specific installation and the design of ephemera. Campbell’s work is in the collections of numerous universities, the MoMA Library, The Center for Book Arts, and the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. Campbell divides her time between New York, where she maintains a studio, and Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she teaches sculpture, installation and curation as Associate Professor in the Art & Design Department at Grand Valley State University.

Campbell worked with Mentor, artist/designer Liz Collins on a sculptural series entitled Apparatus for a Dream Sequence, drawing from the alchemy of furniture-adjacent sculptural forms whose curious composition and capacity for material metaphor help to deconstruct our plastic world.

Jordan Martin is an interdisciplinary musician, poet, & artist. She releases much of her music & performance under her project pseudonym ∂αρнηє. She is the author of Portrait As An Αέρας Δύναμη Ένας, a poetry & coloring book. She also has two forthcoming books of poetic music criticism; S.O.S (Some Oscillations Suck!), forthcoming from C.E.E. Press/Label, & Lesbian Music, forthcoming from her own MAD Press.

Martin worked with Mentor, dancer/choreographer Arthur Aviles on the next itteration of her episodic pedagogy project, Teaching to Transgressions: Psycho-Socialite. This itteration of the project will include a small book of poems, a set of matching outfits with embroidered text, wine, & two performers.

Ashton Cooper is a Brooklyn-based independent writer and curator. She has organized exhibitions at Maccarone, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, and the Knockdown Center, all in New York. Recent writing projects include catalogue essays for Mira Dancy’s exhibition at the Yuz Museum in Shanghai and "Ellen Cantor: I’m Still Coming," published by Capricious Press in August 2017. Her writing has appeared in ArtReview, the Brooklyn Rail, Modern Painters, ASAP Journal, and others.

Cooper worked with Mentor, curator Margaret Ewing on a show about queer abstraction and camouflage, exploring how abstraction, specifically, can function as a form of protection, diversion, or camouflage in image-making and queer representation.

Heather Lynn Johnson is a writer, photographer, performance artist and poet, living in New York. She is the author of The Survival Guide For Queer Black Youth (Inpatient Press, 2017). Johnson's work is characterized by its lyricism and cultural critique. Through the use of imagery and the written word, Johnson explores being other-ed in a consumerist society by mining the history of gender, sexuality, and the racialized body. Her formal approach to the narrative, whether visual or poetic, is distinguished by her willingness to lay bare her own existence.

Johnson received an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and her BA from Columbia College Chicago both in Photography.

Johnson worked with Mentor, poet Pamela Sneed on a poetic guide to survival for the black and queer in America utilizing personal dreams, familial history, and life experience to inform the piece.

Emily U. Hashimoto is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY. She is a VONA/Voices alumna, and her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Kalyani Magazine, Bitch Magazine, and Indiewire. She received her BA from Douglass College at Rutgers University and her MS from Pratt Institute.

Hashimoto worked with her mentor, author Sarah Schulman, on her novel about two queer women of color over the course of thirteen years, following them as they grow away from and towards each other.

Christina Quintana (CQ) is a writer with Cuban and Louisiana roots. Her plays include: Azul (2017 Kilroys List), Evensong (Astoria Performing Arts Center), and Scissoring (Finalist Alliance/Kendeda), among others. Her poetry and prose has appeared in Foglifter, Nimrod Journal, Saw Palm, and beyond. A Van Lier New Voices Fellow at the Lark and member of the Obie-winning cohort of playwrights, EST/Youngblood, she holds an MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University.

Quintana worked Mentor, performer/writer Moe Angelos on a “novel-in-performance” exploring the story of two individuals named Tobias: one, among the first 11 enslaved men brought to New Amsterdam, eventually recaptured for his sexual involvement with Dutch settler Harmen van den Bogaert; and the other, a fictional modern New Yorker entangled in a complicated interracial relationship.

Virgil B/G Taylor is an artist and writer based in Brooklyn. He received a BA in Studio Art and American Studies focusing on printmaking and queer theory from Wesleyan University. He works between text and image, communities and computers. As a member of the What Would an HIV Doula Do? collective he works to bring attention to the HIV/AIDS crisis as an ongoing intersectional political reality through asking questions and designing paper crafts. He runs http://fag.tips/, a speculative zine.

Taylor worked with Mentor, artist Carrie Yamaoka on his series of online publications while also developing a new series of works in two and three dimensions.

Liz Collins is an artist known for her diverse work in textiles, and has over two decades moved fluidly between fields and formats including fashion, craft, performance, and design. Collins’ multi-media installations and textile works have been featured in museums and galleries internationally, including a current long-term installation at the Tang Museum at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, as well as group exhibitions at ICA/Boston, the FIT Museum, Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, MoMA, and the New Museum, among many others.

Avram Finkelstein is a founding member of the Silence=Death and Gran Fury collectives. He has work in the permanent collections of MoMA, The Whitney, The New 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 is out in November 2017.

Stephen Winter is an award-winning writer and filmmaker whose 2015 film Jason and Shirley was called “one of the year’s finest” by Richard Brody in The New Yorker. Jason and Shirley played AGO in Toronto and had a sold-out 2 week run at MoMA in New York. Winter’s newest venture is a 8 part radio podcast sci-fi satire series Adventures in New America, premiering in 2018 on the Night Vale Network. His award winning 1996 debut film Chocolate Babies premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, and enjoyed a 2016 revival at New York's Anthology Film Archives. Winter produced Jonathan Caouette’s landmark “narci-cinema” documentary Tarnation (A.O. Scott, New York Times) which premiered at Sundance, Cannes, LAIFF and NYFF. He has worked on films with Lee Daniels, John Cameron Mitchell, John Krokidas, David France, Xan Cassavetes, Zoe Cassavetes, Allen Hughes, Gus Van Sant and Steve Harvey.

Arthur Avilés is a gay New York-Rican dancer/choreographer. He attended Bard College where he received a B.A. in Theater/Dance. He was a member of Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane & Company and toured internationally. Avilés received a New York Dance and Performance (Bessie) Award, an honorary Doctorate from his alma mater and was honored with the Mayor’s Award for Art and Culture. He has also received a NYFA Fellowship and a NEA Master’s Grant from Pregones Theatre. He continues to create works for his dance company Arthur Avilés Typical Theatre and has been awarded dance residencies at dozens of universities in the US and abroad. He along with Charles Rice-González co-founded The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (BAAD!) celebrating it's 18th year.

Sarah Schulman’s 18 books include the 2016 novel The Cosmopolitans, which Kirkus called “A Modern Classic,”and the nonfiction book Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility and the Duty of Repair, which bell hooks called "Awesome and briliant." A playwright, screenwriter, journalist and AIDS historian, Schulman is co-founder of MIX: NYC Queer Experimental Film Festival, now in its 30th year. Her awards include a Guggenheim (Playwrighting), Fulbright (Judaic Studies) and the Kessler Prize for Significant Contribution to LGBT Studies.

Carrie Yamaoka has exhibited widely in the US and Europe since the 1980s. Her most recent solo exhibition was at Lucien Terras in New York in September 2015. Yamaoka’s work has been featured in Greater New York 2015 at MoMA/PS1, and in exhibitions at the Mannheimer Kunstverein, CAN Neuchatel, MMKA, the Wexner Center, the Albright-Knox, MassMOCA and Artists Space among other venues. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Art in America, The New Yorker, Bomb, and Time Out New York. Yamaoka’s work is in the public collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY. She is a founding member of the queer art collective fierce pussy.

Moe Angelos is one of The Five Lesbian Brothers, who have written, performed and published six plays and other things that the internet can tell you all about. Moe has collaborated with the Builders Association as a performer and writer since 2000 and is now touring with The Builders’ show, Elements of Oz. She has been involved with the WOW Café forever and has appeared in the work of many downtown luminaries including Carmelita Tropicana, Anne Bogart, Holly Hughes, Lois Weaver, Kate Stafford, Brooke O’Harra, Half Straddle and The Ridiculous Theatrical Company.

Pamela Sneed is a New York-based poet, writer and performer. She is the author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom Than Slavery, KONG and Other Works and a chaplet, Gift by Belladonna. She has been featured in the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Time Out, Bomb, VIBE, and on the cover of New York Magazine. She has appeared in Art Forum, The Huffington Post and Hyperallergic. Sneed has performed at the Brooklyn Museum, Poetry Project, NYU and Pratt Universities, Smack Mellon Gallery, was an artist-in-residence at Poet-Linc, Lincoln Center Education, and directed a final showcase at Lincoln Center Atrium. Her work appears in Nikki Giovanni’s, “The 100 Best African American Poets.” Her forthcoming chapbook, Sweet Dreams, will be published by Belladonna in late 2017.

Kimberly Mayhorn is a self-taught multi-disciplinary artist utilizing installation, sculpture, theatre, dance, sound and film/video. The Brooklyn-based artist is a Whitney Museum of American Art, Independent Study Fellow. Mayhorn creates large-scale, site-responsive installations, assemblages, and sculptures that are process-driven and often influenced by a historical context, then stripped away from their initial motivation, pared down to a singular thought and built back up slowly to create a new language and narrative in her artwork. Mayhorn is an Emmy nominated video editor with 20 years experience working in the television industry at networks such as NBC, CNN, CBS, and MTV.

Margaret Ewing is a curator, art historian, and writer. Her curatorial credits include recent exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, where she co-organized Kai Althoff: and then leave me to the common swifts, Pierre Huyghe: Untilled, The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, and Carol Bove: The Equinox. Prior to joining MoMA, she contributed to the 2013 Triennial at the International Center of Photography and spent two years working in Berlin as a research fellow and critic, writing for Artforum, among other publications. She holds a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Illinois, where she completed her dissertation on Hans Haacke’s work on postwar German politics and identity.

Rodrigo Bellott was born in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. His breakout film, Sexual Dependencywon over 15 awards in over 65 film festivals around the world and was also Bolivia’s first film competing for “Best Foreign Language Film” at the 2004 Academy Awards.VARIETY magazine named Bellott as one of the “TOP TEN Latin American Talents to Watch”.

Bellott worked with Mentor, filmmaker Silas Howard on the film adaptation of his play Tu Me Manques, that explores contemporary queer identity in the moment of historical change in contrast with the current situations in other parts of the world.

Monstah Black is a multi-disciplinary performing artist and educator and has accumulated numerous awards including the Tom Murrine Performance Award and the BRIC Media Arts Fellowship. He has taught and performed internationally with various dance companies as well as with his own work. He is currently working on a dance film project called “Cotton” sponsored by New York Foundation for the Arts.

Monstah worked with Mentor, dancer and choreographer Arthur Aviles on a performance project entitled HYPERBOLIC!.

Wells Chandler is a MFA recipient in painting at the Yale School of Art where he was awarded the Ralph Mayer Prize for proficiency in materials and techniques. With shows nationally and internationally, Chandler’s latest body of work entitled “The Best Little Whore House in Texas” opens this fall at Roberto Paradise Gallery in San Juan, PR.

Chandler worked with Mentor, visual artist Angela Dufresne on a series of crocheted figurative works and resin paintings.

Erin Greenwell wrote and directed the feature film My Best Day, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012. Her other directing endeavors include Oh Come On, a punk DIY performance video for Kathleen Hanna’s band The Julie Ruin and The Golden Age of Hustlers, featuring Justin Vivian Bond’s remake of the iconic song written by legendary punk chanteuse Bambi Lake. In 2006, Greenwell formed Smithy Productions, a production company, with the aim of cultivating talents from the queer/independent art community under the umbrella of narrative and documentary storytelling.

Greenwell worked with Mentor, director and screenwriter Stacie Passonto develop her narrative feature length script, The Flight Deck, based on the butch/femme lesbian bar scene in Buffalo, NY during the 1950s.

Doron Langberg was born in Israel, and currently lives and works in Queens, NY. He received his MFA from Yale University and holds a BFA from the University of Pennsylvania and a Certificate from PAFA. He is a recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant and the Yale Schoelkopf Travel Prize, named as a NYFA Painting Finalist. Langberg’s work was featured in New American Paintings and is in the permanent collection of the PAFA Museum.

Langberg worked with Mentor, visual artist and writer Avram Finkelstein on a series of paintings.

Jacob Matkov writes poetry in Brooklyn, NY where he teaches first year writing and is the coordinator of the English / Creative Writing graduate programs at LIU Brooklyn. He is a co-founding editor of visceral brooklyn and his poems have been published in fields magazine, voicemail poems, Maudlin House, thosethatthis, Downtown Brooklyn and others. He received his BA from Arcadia University and his MA and MFA both at LIU Brooklyn.

Matkov worked with Mentor, author Jaime Manrique on a manuscript of poems examining the experience of trauma.

Mylo Mendez is a Texas-born video artist currently based in Brooklyn. Hir work uses humor, narrative, and characters with aberrant bodies to navigate identity, social and geographical borders, and history. Mendez has been featured in group shows in New York City and Austin. Ze received hir MFA from Parsons The New School for Design.

Mendez worked with Mentor, filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris on a film about the intersection of trans and punk identities and communities in New York City.

Eva Peskin & Justine Williams are interdisciplinary artists, performers and culture producers. Joint project, Nothing to See Here is perfect example of their use of civic multi-media performance engaging audience-participants dystopia (co-created with Vanessa Gilbert). Peskin is a member of ANIMALS Performance Group and teaches critical media literacy with The Learning About Multimedia Project while Williams is working on New Mystical Readers, a series of queer vision quests incorporating Jungian archetype theories, quizzes, collage, and stop-motion video.

Peskin and Williams worked with Mentor, playwright, director and dramaturgTalvin Wilks on a performance that rethinks the oath of the first Boy Scout Handbook, questioning accountability, community service and self development with an ethical lens rooted in queer, feminist and anti-racist thought.

Hugh Ryan is a writer and curator in New York City, whose work focuses on queer politics, culture, and history. He is the Founding Director of the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, sits on the Board of QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, and has an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Bennington.

Ryan worked with Mentor, curator Shannon Michael Cane on a forthcoming show of outsider art at La MaMa Galleria.

Brendan Williams-Childs is a short-story writer from Wyoming. His work has appeared on NPR and in Midwestern Gothic Issue Literary Journal. In 2013, he was awarded the Larry Neal Writers’ Award. He co-edits the very small zine and chapbook press Cheap Dates Press.

Williams-Childs worked with Mentor, author Sarah Schulman on an anthology of speculative short stories.

Silas Howard began his career as a founding member of the legendary queer punk band Tribe8. His first feature film, By Hook or By Crook, was a Sundance Film Festival premiere and five-time Best Feature winner. His documentary, What I Love About Dying, premiered at Sundance and played festivals internationally. His short films, music videos and web series have aired on MTV, Logo, Showtime and the Sundance Channel. His second feature, Sunset Stories, premiered at SXSW in 2012 and was picked up for distribution by Film Buff.

Arthur Aviles, an award-winning New York-Rican dancer/choreographer, was born in Queens and raised in Long Island and the South Bronx. He studied theatre with Peter Vercillo and Edward M. Fourrey. His physical training included swimming, diving, wrestling and gymnastics. He received his B.A. from Bard College where he studied dance with Lenore Latimer, Jean Churchill, Albert Reid and Aileen Passloff.

Angela Dufresne was born in Hartford CT to Polish, Irish, French and Italian Catholics in 1969. She was raised in Olathe, Kansas, the town where Dick and Perry stopped in before they went on the kill the Clutters. She was the first of her family linage to get a college degree.

Stacie Passon is an American film director and screenwriter, whose debut film Concussion premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, and subsequently won a Teddy Award Jury Prize at the 2013 Berlin International Film Festival.

Finkelstein is a founding member of the Silence=Death collective and the art collective, Gran Fury, with whom he collaborated on public art projects for The Whitney Museum, The Venice Biennale, Artforum, LAMOCA, The New Museum, Creative Time, and The Public Art Fund. The collective has work in the permanent collections of The Whitney, MoMA, and The New Museum.

Jaime Manrique was born in Colombia, South America. His first three books—a novella and short stories, a volume of film criticism, and a book of poems (which won his country’s National Poetry Award)—were written in Spanish. Starting with the novel, Colombian Gold, he’s been writing his fiction, and most of his non-fiction, exclusively in English, though he still writes poetry in his native tongue.

Thomas Allen Harris is the founder and President Chimpanzee Productions, a company dedicated to producing unique audio-visual experiences that illuminate the Human Condition and the search for identity, family, and spirituality.

Talvin Wilks is a playwright, director and dramaturg. His plays include Tod, the boy, Tod, The Trial of Uncle S&M, Bread of Heaven, and An American Triptych.

Shannon Michael Cane is a writer, curator, collector and publisher from Melbourne, Australia. After publishing and editing the seminal queer art journal THEY SHOOT HOMO’S DON’T THEY? for five years, he moved to NYC in 2008 to work at the world’s largest non-profit specializing in artists’ books; Printed Matter, Inc. Currently working as the curator of fairs and editions he is responsible for staging the NY and LA Art Book Fairs.

Morgan Bassichis is a writer and performer whose shows include When the Baba Yaga Eats You Alive and The Witch House. Morgan has performed at Dixon Place, the Wild Project, Recess, and the Garage (San Francisco), as part of the MIX Festival and the HOT! Festival, and in films by Dia Felix and Maria Breaux. Morgan is a graduate of Brown University, a practitioner of Generative Somatics, and has published essays in the Radical History Review, Captive Genders, and other anthologies.

Bassichis worked with Mentor, performance artist Jibz Cameron on a solo show based on “fake” folktales inspired by Yiddish and Slavic mystical fairy tales woven together with stories from his own sojourn to Poland.

Arisleyda Dilone left public policy and began to imagine a life outside of the field in 2010, after years of working in international affairs and in New York City politics. Aris developed a documentary concept that was accepted into the Latino Producers Academy administered by the National Association of Latino Independent Producers (NALIP). In August 2011, NALIP announced she had been chosen for the Latino Artists Mentoring Program (LAMP). In 2012, she began to develop her first feature documentary IN BETWEEN about her experience as an intersex female in a Dominican-American setting. Her project was awarded a 2012 Travel & Study Grant from the Jerome Foundation. As a Dominican immigrant, raised in America, Aris always seeks to maintain a relationship with her Latino roots. Through her political work as community organizer in Brooklyn, New York she became closely acquainted with the Latino communities in Williamsburg and Bushwick. In 2013-2014 she was a UnionDocs Collaborative Fellow working on the web-based interactive documentary project: Living Los Sures.

Dilone worked with Mentor, documentary filmmaker Yoruba Richen on a personal documentary concerning conflicts around gender identity, femininity and cultural borders as an intersex woman in a Dominican-American family.

Zachary Frater is a Jamaican-descended producer, curator and performer from the Upper West Side. As the intellectual androgyne Banjela Davis, he/she hosts Legends, Statements & Stars!, a multimedia platform highlighting the personal testimony and creative spirit of the QTPOC community through talk series, showcases, street journalism, and zines. Zachary has exhibited and performed at Project Reach, BAAD!, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Prince Street Project Space, La MaMa, Dixon Place, and JACK, and has been published through Visual AIDS, BX200, and Posture. Zachary received his BA in Art History from City College of New York. Photo by Christian Cisneros

Frater worked with Mentor, curator and Dirty Looks NYC founder Bradford Nordeen to develop a televised queer news network to provide resources to queer youth of color reminiscent of pre-internet cable programming.

Shannon Keating is a fiction and non-fiction writer living in Brooklyn. Her work—which is broadly concerned with the representation of gender and queerness in literature, cinema, and the mainstream media—has appeared at The Atlantic, Bitch, Salon, The Rumpus, and The Hairpin, among many others. She graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Connecticut College in 2013 with a BA in Narrative Studies: Literature and Film, for which she completed an honors thesis of scripts and short stories. She is the recipient of a Mellon International Research Grant for cultural study in Florence, Italy, as well as Connecticut College’s Film Theory and Criticism Prize for a graduating senior. After spending the spring of 2014 with the European Independent Film Festival in Paris, France, she moved to New York to begin an Atlantic Media Business Fellowship at Quartz.

Keating worked with Mentor, actor, novelist, and playwright James Lecesne on a lesbian coming-of-age novel following a rugby playing 18-year-old, middle-class, femme-ish gueer girl named Lola.

Luce Capco Lincoln is a trans queer Filipino filmmaker, originally from Gainesville, FL, now living in Brooklyn. Lincoln works as a Media Educator at Global Action Project and just finished producing and editing a documentary, In His Own Home, about a 2010 police shooting that happened as a result of police militarization. Lincoln’s early work used personal stories to talk about the intersections of being mixed race, queer and gender non-conforming. Lincoln received a MFA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University.

Lincoln worked with Mentor, filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris on a series of short experimental videos that uses the family archive to examine LGBTQ history in the 1910’s and 1920’s.

Samantha Nye is a Brooklyn based painter and video artist. Much of her work centers around a cast of women (ages 50- 92) related to her either through blood or the social circles of her mother and grandmother. Viewing the family as a perverse engine of intimacy, her art probes the visibility of sexuality that is inherent within families. She uses reenactment and performances of seduction to question where or from whom we learn these methods.

Nye worked with Mentor, painter and writer Carrie Moyer on a series of paintings and drawings using her grandmother’s friends to reenact scenes from vintage Playboy magazines, a painting series based on her experience working at a casino, and a series of video reenactments queering Scopitone films from the 60’s.

Maia Cruz Palileo is a multi-disciplinary artist. Migration and the permeable concept of home are constant themes in their paintings, sculptures, and installations. Influenced by the oral history of their family’s arrival in America from the Philippines and their experience of growing up in the Midwest, Maia infuses these narratives with memory and imagination. Among their group exhibitions are those at ArtGate Gallery, Bronx River Art Center, CUE Art Foundation, Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, International Studio & Curatorial Program, and Wave Hill. Their work has been featured in Contemporary Art Philippines. They are a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant and the Astraea Visual Arts Fund Award and has participated in the Bronx Museum’s Artist In the Marketplace Program. They have taught at Brooklyn College, CUNY, Rutgers University, Newark, The Laundromat Project, and Smack Mellon. Maia currently teaches painting and sculpture with the Joan Mitchell Foundation. They were recently nominated for the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant, awarded a residency at the Millay Colony for the Arts, and has an upcoming solo show at Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space in January 2015.

Palileo worked with Mentor, visual artist Chitra Ganesh on research/portrait project on their “chosen family”, their LGBTQ peers, that will result in a new body of paintings.

Rebecca Patek is a New York-based choreographer and performance artist creating work that synthesizes dance, theater and comedy. She is a 2014 Brooklyn Arts Exchange Space Grant recipient. Patek has been an Artist in Residence at Movement Research, Atlantic Center for the Arts and at Dance Theater Workshop (New York Live Arts) as part of Fresh Tracks Performance and Residency Program. Patek’s work has been presented at The Museum of Arts and Design, The Chocolate Factory Theater, Abrons Art Center, Dance Theater Workshop, 92nd Street Y, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Josee Bienvenu Gallery, Triple Canopy, Prelude Festival, and Dixon Place, among other venues. Works commissioned in 2012-14 include “you and i of the storm” for the Museum of Arts and Design, “Real Eyes” for The Chocolate Factory Theater and “ineter(a)nal f/ear” as part of Festival TBD: Emergency Glitter and American Realness at Abrons Art Center.

Patek worked with Mentor, Big Art Group founder Caden Manson on a performance project that tells the story of an infamous crime from the 1920’s (the Leopold and Loeb case) through the lens of a family history.

Grey Vild is a Queer Art Mentorship & Brooklyn Poets fellow & a MFA candidate in poetry at Rutgers University. His work can be found at Them, Vetch, Harriet: The Blog and elsewhere.

Vild worked with Mentor, poet, editor and arts administrator Stacy Szymaszekon a serial poem that will be turned into a chapbook.

Steven Wilsey is an award-winning filmmaker who received a MFA in film directing from Columbia University. He also has bachelor’s degrees in journalism and political science. His documentary work has won him a student Emmy as well as Best Documentary Short at NewFest in New York City and his films have screened in festivals around the world. Red Car, his most recent film, is a narrative short pulled from his childhood experience in rural Oregon.

Wilsey worked with Mentor, director and screenwriter Stacie Passon to develop a screenplay for a modern queer thriller that reveals gay characters not often portrayed in film.

Jibz Cameron is a performance/video artist and actor who lives and works in New York City. Her work as alter ego Dynasty Handbag has been seen such institutions as The New Museum NY, The Kitchen,  MOMA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and more as well as many international dives both great and small. She has been heralded by the New York Times as “the funniest and most pitch perfect performance seen in years."

Yoruba Richen is an award - winning documentary filmmaker who has directed films in the U.S. and abroad. Her work has been featured on PBS, New York Times Op Doc, New York Magazine’s website, The Cut, and The Atlantic.  Her last film The New Black won multiple festival awards and was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and a GLAAD Media Award. The New Black opened theatrically at New York’s Film Forum and aired on PBS's Independent Lens in 2014. She recently won a Clio award for her short film about the Grammy nominated singer Andra Day. Yoruba received the Creative Promise Award at Tribeca All Access and was also a Sundance Producers Fellow. She is a featured TED Speaker, a Guggenheim Fellow and a 2016 recipient of the Chicken & Egg Breakthrough Filmmaker Award. 

Bradford Nordeen holds an MA in Cinema Cultures from King’s College London and a BFA in Photography and Media from CalArts. The founder of Dirty Looks NYC, a platform for queer experimental film and video, and the site-specific off-shoot series, Dirty Looks: On Location, a month of queer interventions in New York City spaces.

James Lecesne has been telling stories for over twenty-five years. He has created several his solo shows, including WORD OF MOUTH, which won the NY Drama Desk Award & NY Oter Cristics Circle Award).  His short film, TREVOR, received an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short in 1994, and went on to inspire The Trevor Project,  the only nationwide 24-hour suicide prevention and crisis intervention Lifeline for LGBT and Questioning youth. James has also written for TV, he is the author of several novels for Young Adults and he was most recently seen as an actor in Gore’s Vidal THE BEST MAN on Broadway.

Thomas Allen Harris is the founder and President Chimpanzee Productions, a company dedicated to producing unique audio-visual experiences that illuminate the Human Condition and the search for identity, family, and spirituality.

Carrie Moyer is a painter and writer. She has shown extensively in the US and Europe since 1994. In 2012-13 Moyer was the subject of two solo museum exhibitions: “Carrie Moyer: Pirate Jenny,” Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY and “Carrie Moyer: Interstellar,” Worcester Museum of Art, MA. Moyer’s work will be included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. Between 1991-2008, Moyer and photographer Sue Schaffner collaborated as Dyke Action Machine! DAM! is known for its bold, witty public art campaigns that dissected mainstream advertising by inserting of lesbian images into commercial media formats. Moyer’s writing has appeared in Art in America, Artforum, the Brooklyn Rail among others, and in recent catalogs for Louise Fishman and Nancy Grossman. She is a Professor at Hunter College. Moyer is represented by DC Moore Gallery in New York City. Photo by © Girl Ray, 2016

Chitra Ganesh was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, where she currently lives and works. Her drawing, installation, text-based work, and collaborations seek to excavate and circulate buried narratives typically excluded from official canons of history, literature, and art.

Caden Manson is co-founder of Big Art Group and editor of contemporaryperformance.com. He has co-created, directed, video and set designed 13 Big Art Group productions that have toured nationally and internationally.

Stacy Szymaszek is a poet, editor and arts administrator. She is the author of the books Emptied of All Ships (2005) and Hyperglossia (2009), both published by Litmus Press, as well as numerous chapbooks, including Pasolini Poems (Cy Press, 2005), Orizaba: A Voyage with Hart Crane (Faux Press, 2008), Stacy S.: Autoportraits (OMG, 2008), from Hart Island (Albion Books, 2009) and austerity measures (Fewer & Further Press, 2012).

Stacie Passon is an American film director and screenwriter, whose debut film Concussion premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, and subsequently won a Teddy Award Jury Prize at the 2013 Berlin International Film Festival.

Seyi Adebanjo, is a Queer, gender-non-conforming, Nigerian artist living in the South Bronx. As a media artist Seyi raises awareness around social issues through digital video, multimedia photography and writings. Seyi’s work is the intersection of art, media, imagination, ritual and politics. Seyi has been an accomplished artist, performing with Sharon Bridgforth and performing at the Walker Art Center. Seyi’s work has recently been screened at the Bronx Documentary Center and the Sydney Transgender International Film Festival. Seyi has been a Project Involve Fellow and City Lore Documentary Institute scholarship recipient. Seyi is currently artist in residence with Allgo working on The Orita Project, an international film and performance endeavor.

Adebanjo worked with Mentor, documentary filmmaker Yoruba Richen on a film experimenting with ritual, the erotic and gender through the Yorùbá religion as both a culture and spiritual practice.

Ella Boureau (director) is an NYC-based writer, editor, events curator and is currently the Awards Coordinator for the Lambda Literary Foundation. She is a 2013 Queer / Art / Mentorship alum, and founded and ran the online magazine and reading series In the Flesh for several years, an exploration of queerness as a desire for knowledge wedded to the erotic. Her writing has been featured in Guernica, Tin House, Slice Magazine, The Rumpus, and Full Stop, and her first play, Helps to Hate You a Little: A Lovestory, debuted at Cloud City in November 2016. She is currently at work on a second play called Province 49: or The Wolf, Once a Stunning Girl-Child.

Boureau worked on a play entitled Helps to Hate you a Little with Mentor, actor and playwright Moe Angelos.

Bridget de Gersigny, is a South African visual artist based in Brooklyn, working primarily in video, installation, and sound. Having grown up under apartheid and experiencing the ripping shift from oppression to democracy in her teens, made her super aware of the space between impassioned belief and error. A place where fundamental ideologies collided. She creates interactive multimedia installations, bringing to consciousness aspects of those things, like looking at very long histories or different ways of relations of how things exist and shape our perceptions. Her work engages in the intersection of the queer community and other communities. Bridget is a 2013 ICP-Bard MFA graduate and holds a BA (Hons) degree from the University of Cape Town, in Psychology and Literature, and Art from University of South Africa.

Gersigny worked with Mentor, visual artist Carlos Motta, on a project that explores queer history and cultural difference in Brooklyn.

Nicole Goodwin, was the recipient of City’s College’s The Riggs Gold Medal Essay Award for 2011 and finalist for the Poets House’s 2013 Poets House Emerging Poets Fellowship Program and a fellow of the North Country Institute and Retreat for Writers of Color. She is the former editor of the Escriba/Write, winner of the 2006 CCHA Eastern Region Small Journal Award. A single mother, she earned her Bachelor’s of Arts in English and Anthropology from City College of New York in June of 2011. Recently, she published an article “Talking with My Daughter…” for the New York Times Parents Blog,and will be featured in the upcoming documentary film “Tough Love.”

Goodwin worked with Mentor, writer Jaime Manrique on a poetic project exploring gender and race identity and homeless LGBTQ youth.

Rick Herron, is a curator, artist, writer and museum worker from Plattsburg, MO. He has participated in projects with Visual AIDS, Elmgreen & Dragset, Michael Alan Alien, palissimo, Dis Magazine, and many others. He recently curated queer performance for The LGBT Center at the Ideas City festival including artists such as Buzz Slutzky, Ann Liv Young, Becca Blackwell and Dandy Darkly. Since 2007 he has worked at the New Museum where he is Assistant Manager of Visitor Services.

Herron worked with Mentor, curator Pati Hertling, on an exhibition about the legacy of Keith Haring for the Spirit Museum in Stockholm.

Peter Knegt, is a writer, filmmaker and blogger born and raised in Ontario, Canada. He was worked primarily and extensively as a film journalist, most notably for New York-based online magazine Indiewire, where he’s worked since 2006 and currently serves as their Senior Writer. His first book, About Canada: Queer Rights — a historical account of LGBT activism in Canada — was released in 2011. He is also the co-founder and artistic director of Picton Picturefest, a film festival for youth in rural Canada, and recently completed work on his first short film, “Good Morning.”

Knegt worked with Mentor, actor, novelist, and playwright James Lecesne on a literary work based on his experience at “The Pilgrimage”, a portable-film-festival odyssey in the Scottish Highlands organized by Tilda Swinton and Mark Cousins.

Natalia Leite, is an artist and filmmaker, born and raised in Sao Paulo, Brazil. She began her career showcasing art films in galleries in Sao Paulo and San Francisco. Since moving to New York in 2006, she has directed music videos, docs, and short films which have screened in numerous festivals internationally. She is currently working on her first feature film, Bare, produced by Derrick Tseng (Prince Avalanche, Party Monster), Alexandra Roxo, and Dahlia Heyman. She is also co-directing a documentary called Shooting Serrano, produced by VICE, the comedy web series, Be Here Nowish, and a pilot for a VICE Series called Every Woman. She is a recipient of the Kodak Student Grant Award and a Sundance Screenwriters Lab Finalist. Her work can be seen on: www.gotpurplemilk.com.

Leite worked with Mentor, narrative filmmaker Rose Troche on her first feature length film about a young woman living life to the fullest in Nevada.

Troy Michie, is a visual artist who was born and raised in Southwest Texas. Utilizing the methodologies of collage and assemblage, he investigates the boundaries between race and sexuality. His work has been exhibited at Anna Kustera Gallery, The Stedelijk Museum s-Hertogenbosch, and will be included in “Outside the Lines” an upcoming group exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. He received his BFA from the University of Texas at El Paso and his MFA from Yale School of Art.

Michie worked with Mentor, visual artist Geoff Chadsey on a series of sculptures and mixed media works inspired by Jean Genet’s Querelle of Brest.

Colin Self, composes and choreographs new trajectories for Global Queer Consciousness. His performances explore aesthetic temperament between vocality, violence, popular culture, and sincerity. Spanning a transdisciplinary lifestyle, Colin seeks to embellish diverse cultures with queer presence and develop a highly stylized language of transnational communication. Through his performance work, community organization, and personal life, Colin exhibits the power and beauty of feminized identities as a constant praxes of collective resistance.

Lain Kay, is a cross disciplinary artist focused in the mystique of identity branding. Graduate of California College of the Arts with a BFA in Painting and Drawing, his senior work portrays multiples of himself acting out appropriated cliches within art history and nationalistic propaganda. Indicative of a tounge-and-cheek punk attitude; these aesthetics inform and modify more recent performance works. Through mostly collaborative, music driven projects, Lain Kay positions himself as faux pop star with a tabloid tragicness. This playful hypocrisy of ethics invites commodification, but intends to perform a mockery of class values in our culture, and the timelessness of power and spectacle.

Self and Kay worked as a collaborative pair on a multimedia installation and performance on gendered pop culture and consumerism with Mentor, Big Art Group founder Caden Manson.

Xeňa Stanislavovna Semjonová, is a poet, artist, and translator originally from Slovakia, now living in NYC. Xeňa has performed in venues such as the Poetry Project, Dixon Place, Interstate Projects, Bowery Poetry Club, Michelle Tea’s RADAR, Panpoly Performance Laboratory, SPECTRUM NYC, Strange Maine, the Lynn Redgrave Theater, Page 22 Poetry Parlor, Happy Endings, GRRRLS on FILM, the Leslie Lohman Gallery, and many others. She is a Poets House 2013 Fellow; and is the Editor of What Now, an audio anthology of poetry. Her project SHE is upcoming as both a book and a performance in 2014.

Semjonová worked on writings focused on trans voice and experience with Mentor, performance artist and musician Geo Wyeth.

Yoruba Richen is an award - winning documentary filmmaker who has directed films in the U.S. and abroad. Her work has been featured on PBS, New York Times Op Doc, New York Magazine’s website, The Cut, and The Atlantic. Her last film The New Black won multiple festival awards and was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and a GLAAD Media Award. The New Black opened theatrically at New York’s Film Forum and aired on PBS's Independent Lens in 2014. She recently won a Clio award for her short film about the Grammy nominated singer Andra Day. Yoruba received the Creative Promise Award at Tribeca All Access and was also a Sundance Producers Fellow. She is a featured TED Speaker, a Guggenheim Fellow and a 2016 recipient of the Chicken & Egg Breakthrough Filmmaker Award. 

Moe Angelos is one of The Five Lesbian Brothers, who have written, performed and published six plays and other things that the internet can tell you all about. Moe has collaborated with the Builders Association as a performer and writer since 2000 and is now touring with The Builders’ show, Elements of Oz. She has been involved with the WOW Café forever and has appeared in the work of many downtown luminaries including Carmelita Tropicana, Anne Bogart, Holly Hughes, Lois Weaver, Kate Stafford, Brooke O’Harra, Half Straddle and The Ridiculous Theatrical Company. To hear more, visit The Made Here Project and browse the artists.

Carlos Motta is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work draws upon political history in an attempt to create counter narratives that recognize the inclusion of suppressed histories, communities, and identities.

Jaime Manrique was born in Colombia, South America. His first three books—a novella and short stories, a volume of film criticism, and a book of poems (which won his country’s National Poetry Award)—were written in Spanish. Starting with the novel, Colombian Gold, he’s been writing his fiction, and most of his non-fiction, exclusively in English, though he still writes poetry in his native tongue.

Pati Hertling is a New York-based curator and writer. Since 2005 she has been working on small, independent curatorial projects. Hertling has authored texts on artists and art. Texts include a short essay in the catalogue for modern at the Chelsea Art Museum, an interview with Jonathan Horowitz for an exhibition at Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee, UK, an essay for a Hayley Tompkins catalogue published by the Inverleith House, Edinburgh, UK and a review of a Collier Schorr exhibition in Berlin for V Magazine. She is currently working on a publication on Art Law.

James Lecesne has been telling stories for over twenty-five years. He has created several his solo shows, including WORD OF MOUTH, which won the NY Drama Desk Award & NY Oter Cristics Circle Award).  His short film, TREVOR, received an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short in 1994, and went on to inspire The Trevor Project,  the only nationwide 24-hour suicide prevention and crisis intervention Lifeline for LGBT and Questioning youth. James has also written for TV, he is the author of several novels for Young Adults and he was most recently seen as an actor in Gore’s Vidal THE BEST MAN on Broadway.

Rose Troche grew up in the Midwest suburbs, part of a large Puerto Rican family. After making short films and videos, she made her feature debut with the groundbreaking lesbian love story, go fish, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1994.

Francisco. He has been in New York since 2003. He has had solo shows at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, James Harris Gallery in Seattle, Electric Works Gallery in San Francisco, and the Contemporary Museum in Honolulu.

Caden Manson is co-founder of Big Art Group and editor of contemporaryperformance.com. He has co-created, directed, video and set designed 13 Big Art Group productions that have toured nationally and internationally.

Geo Wyeth is an artist and musician living and working out of New York City.  Recent practices expand on narrative and popular music performance through experimentation with formal and conceptual ideas of repetition, interruption, amateurism and emotional representation, often with handmade props and sets.

Kyle Coniglio is a painter who was born and raised in New Jersey. He is a 2012 MFA graduate of the Yale school of  art and recently completed an affiliated fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. Currently Coniglio works in Hoboken, NJ and teaches at William Paterson University.

Kyle worked with Geoff Chadsey on a series of self-portrait based paintings that combine anecdote and allegory.

Michael De Angelis is a visual artist who has created video, sound, costume, prop and set pieces for theater companies HalfStraddle, Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf and performance artists Becca Blackwell, Eliza Bent and Dave Malloy among others. He has also assisted on and produced projects for visual artists Sharon Hayes, Matthew Buckingham and Andrea Geyer. Commercially, Michael has shot, edited and produced video content for various websites such as BigThink.com and MarloThomas.com on Huffington Post and AOL.

Michael worked with Dan Hurlin on an experimental video piece that explores the way a queer history is perceived.

Kerry Downey (born Fort Lauderdale, 1979) is an interdisciplinary artist and teacher. Downey’s work explores how we interact with each other physically, psychologically, and socio-politically. Encompassing video, printmaking, drawing, installation, and performance, their work is influenced by Downey’s personal experience of top surgery and gender queerness. In spring 2015, mentor Angela Dufresne took Downey on a fishing trip upstate. Downey's subsequent video and performance project, Fishing with Angela, investigates intergenerational feminist and queer haptics.

Recent exhibition venues include the Queens Museum, Flushing, NY; the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Annandale, NY; the Drawing Center, New York, NY; Taylor Macklin, Zurich, Switzerland; and Franklin Street Works, Stamford, CT.  In 2015, Downey was awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Emerging Artist Grant.  Artist-in-residencies include SHIFT at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space, the Drawing Center’s Open Sessions, Real Time and Space in Oakland, CA, and the Vermont Studio Center. They hold a BA from Bard College and an MFA from Hunter College.

Kerry Downey worked with Angela Dufresne  on a recent video project shot in a derelict office building in midtown. They’ll also be working out the kinks in Downey’s new print series “Phantom Bounce,” a group of monotypes about phantom boobs.

Thomas Dozol was born in Martinique and schooled in Economics, Social Studies, and Theatre in Paris. In 2002, he moved from Paris to New York as a stage actor, and became involved, among other things, with budding cabaret act The Citizens Band. Rather than performing he decided to document and photograph the lead up to their first show at Deitch Projects. The resulting portfolio received great attention, successfully launching him as a published photographer with exhibitions in Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles, and Sau Paolo.

Thomas worked with Billy Miller.

Camilo Godoy is an artist engaged in a multidisciplinary art practice. His work addresses the politics of citizenship and migration, and is influenced by strategies of queer politics and theory. He received a BFA from Parsons The New School for Design in 2012. Camilo is a co-founder of QUEEROCRACY and a staff member of Immigrant Movement International.

Camilo worked with Carlos Motta on a project about the meaning of freedom in an effort to interrogate and examine prisons.

Tourmaline lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn and believes creativity & imagination are vital in movements for self determination.  She is a trans activist & artist, working as membership director at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project and blogging at thespiritwas.tumblr.com Tourmaline’s work has been recently featured in Barnard College’s The Scholar & Feminist Online, as well as Captive Genders: Trans Embodiement & The Prison Industrial Complex, Post Post Script Press and Randy Magazine.  

Sasha Wortzel is a media artist and educator based in Brooklyn, NY, working in film/video, installation, and sound. In addition to experimental and documentary film, she creates interactive multimedia installations that utilize physical computing and programming. She has most recently presented work at the Guggenheim Lab NYC, MIX NY Queer Experimental Film Festival, Leslie Lohman Gay Arts Foundation, and at film festivals nationally. She also produces and hosts a weekly radio program about queer art, culture, and politics. She is a recipient of the Robert Rauschenberg/Big Arts grant and is currently artist in residence at the Snug Harbor Cultural Arts Center where she is researching women sailors.

Tourmaline and Sasha worked with Kimberly Reed on “Star People are Beautiful People”, a hybrid documentary-narrative feature about the late transgender activist, Sylvia Rivera and STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries).

Ryan Henneberry, originally from the suburbs of Chicago, received his MFA in fiction from The New School. Since then, he has been teaching English, history, and public speaking at an independent school in New York City.

Ryan worked with Sarah Schulman on a novel.

Melissa Li is a songwriter, composer, and recipient of the 2007 Jonathan Larson Award. Her first full-length musicalSurviving the Nian (The Theater Offensive) opened in Boston later that year and received the IRNE award for Best New Play. Since then, Melissa has toured nationally in the queer music/poetry group Good Asian Drivers and pop-rock band MLBT. Currently she is working with playwright Letta Neely on 99% Stone, a musical based on the Stonewall riots to be fully produced in 2014. In addition, she is writing another untitled musical with poet Kit Yan, based on their experiences on the road. In her spare time, she writes music for mobile games and apps (Atari, Paul Frank). Melissa lives in Brooklyn.

Melissa worked with Moe Angelos on  an as-yet-untitled musical based on my life on tour with Good Asian Drivers in the summer of 2009.

Ricardo Alberto Maldonado was born and raised in Puerto Rico. He is the translator of Dinapiera Di Donato's Collateral (National Poetry Series/Akashic Books) and the recipient of poetry fellowships from Queer/Arts/Mentorship and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He is managing director at the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center and co-hosts the EMPIRE reading series with Hafizah Geter.

Ricky worked with Stacy Szymaszek on a sequence of poems.

iele paloumpis is a dance artist, choreographer and teacher. Having been raised by a disabled parent facing ablism, abuse and resulting poverty, iele thinks a lot about disability justice, youth advocacy, and classism in relation to dance and the work that they do. At the center of their practice are ideas exploring body

iele worked with Trajal Harrell as they further develop call back all the birds (working title) – a new performance piece in collaboration jung-eun kim aka je, with musical accompaniment by Joanna Groom. This work in progress is supported, in part, through a commission from New York Live Arts’ Studio Series program with support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

Lauren Wolkstein is an award-winning filmmaker who received her MFA in film directing from Columbia University’s graduate film program and a BA in computer science and film from Duke University. She was named one of the top twenty-five emerging filmmakers through The Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Independent Filmmaker Project’s inaugural Emerging Visions program at the 2011 New York Film Festival. Her last short film, The Strange Ones, co-directed with Christopher Radcliff, premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. Most recently, Wolkstein wrapped production on her latest short film, Social Butterfly, which was shot in the South of France.

Lauren worked with Rose Troche on the development of her first feature film.

Geoff Chadsey is a drawer (color pencil) with an MFA in photographer from CCA in San Francisco. He has been in New York since 2003. He has had solo shows at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, James Harris Gallery in Seattle, Electric Works Gallery in San Francisco, and the Contemporary Museum in Honolulu.

Dan Hurlin received a 1990 Village Voice Obie award for his solo adaptation of Nathanael West’s A Cool Million, and his suite of puppet pieces Everyday Uses for Sight: Nos. 3 & 7 (2000) earned him a 2001 New York Dance and Performance award (a.k.a. Bessie). His 1992 solo Quintland earned sculptor Donna Dennis a New York Dance and Performance award (a.k.a. Bessie) for visual design, and in 1998, he was nominated for an American Theater Wing Design award for his set design for his music theater piece The Shoulder (music by Dan Moses Schreier).

Angela Dufresne was born in Hartford CT to Polish, Irish, French and Italian Catholics in 1969. She was raised in Olathe, Kansas, the town where Dick and Perry stopped in before they went on the kill the Clutters. She was the first of her family linage to get a college degree.

Billy Miller is an artist-curator-writer-fimmaker-and independent publisher. His artwork has been exhibited internationally at P.S.1/MoMA, John Connelly Presents, Team Gallery, Visionaire Gallery, Andrew Edlin Gallery, D’Amelio Terras Gallery, Dietch Projects, Galerie du Jour, Kunstverein München, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Carlos Motta is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work draws upon political history in an attempt to create counter narratives that recognize the inclusion of suppressed histories, communities, and identities.

Kimberly Reed’sfirst feature-length documentary, Prodigal Sons, has screened at film festivals worldwide, and received the FIPRESCI International Film Critics’ prize at the Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival. Her work has been featured for four consecutive years at IFP’s Independent Film Week, and she was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film.

Sarah Schulman’s 18 books include the 2016 novel The Cosmopolitans, which Kirkus called “A Modern Classic.” Her new nonfiction book, forthcoming in October, is “Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility and the Duty of Repair.” A playwright, screenwriter, journalist and AIDS historian, Sarah is co-founder of MIX: NYC Queer Experimental Film Festival, now in its 30th year. Her awards include a Guggenheim (Playwrighting), Fulbright (Judaic Studies) and the Kessler Prize for Significant Contribution to LGBT Studies.

Moe Angelos is one of The Five Lesbian Brothers, who have written, performed and published six plays and other things that the internet can tell you all about. Moe has collaborated with the Builders Association as a performer and writer since 2000 and is now touring with The Builders’ show, Elements of Oz. She has been involved with the WOW Café forever and has appeared in the work of many downtown luminaries including Carmelita Tropicana, Anne Bogart, Holly Hughes, Lois Weaver, Kate Stafford, Brooke O’Harra, Half Straddle and The Ridiculous Theatrical Company. To hear more, visit The Made Here Project and browse the artists.

Stacy Szymaszek is a poet, editor and arts administrator. She is the author of the books Emptied of All Ships (2005) and Hyperglossia (2009), both published by Litmus Press, as well as numerous chapbooks, including Pasolini Poems (Cy Press, 2005), Orizaba: A Voyage with Hart Crane (Faux Press, 2008), Stacy S.: Autoportraits (OMG, 2008), from Hart Island (Albion Books, 2009) and austerity measures (Fewer & Further Press, 2012).

Trajal Harrell is a dancer-choreographer from New York City, USA. His choreographic works have been seen at Danspace Project, Dance Theater Workshop, The Kitchen, and PS122 in NYC as well as Art Basel-Miami Beach, and internationally, most recently, at the In Transit Festival 2009 (Berlin), Melkweg (Amsterdam), CNDC Angers, and in Mexico City at PRISMA.

Rose Troche grew up in the Midwest suburbs, part of a large Puerto Rican family. After making short films and videos, she made her feature debut with the groundbreaking lesbian love story, go fish, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1994.

Hima B. is a director & producer who makes social issue documentaries, narratives, experimental films and videos that explore the intersections of race, gender, sexual orientation, labor, & economics, especially as they relate to queer people, people of color, & women and girls.

Hima B worked with Matt Wolf.

Jess Barbagallo is an NYC-based writer/director/performer who has toured internationally and domestically with Big Dance Theater, the Builders Association, Theater of a Two-Headed Calf (and its Dyke Division) and Half Straddle. Playwriting credits include Grey-Eyed Dogs (Dixon Place), Saturn Nights (Incubator Arts Center), Good Year for Hunters (New Ohio Theatre), Karen Davis Does … (Brooklyn Arts Exchange), Joe Ranono’s Yuletide Log and Other Fruitcakes (Dixon Place), Sentence Fetish (Brick Theater), Melissa, So Far (Andy’s Playhouse) and My Old Man (and Other Stories) (Dixon Place). Other words have been published by Howlround, Bomb Blog, New York Live Arts Blog: Context Notes, Brooklyn Rail and 53rd State Press. He is a 2009 Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab alum, and a 2013 MacDowell Colony Fellow. In 2015, Jess was selected to participate in the Persona Seminar think tank at the New Museum and was recently invited to the Clubbed Thumb Early Career Writer’s Group. Jess has taught theater and writing as a guest artist and adjunct lecturer at Duke University, New York University, Brooklyn College, the Vermont Young Playwright’s Festival and The O’Neill Center. MFA: Brooklyn College (Himan Brown Playwriting Award 2008 and 2009).

Jess Barbagallo worked with Stacy Szymaszek.

Yve Laris Cohen makes performances, objects, and the occasional video. All of it is dance. Yve was a 2010 Fresh Tracks resident at Dance Theater Workshop, and is currently a Movement Research Artist in Residence.

Yve Laris Cohen worked with Justin Vivian Bond.

Pilar Gallego is a Brooklyn-based artist, curator, and queer community activist. They are interested in exploring and developing a visual language that speaks to and of gender, feminism, and minority representations.

Pilar Gallego worked with Nicole Eisenman.

Pati Hertling is a New York-based curator and writer. Since 2005 she has been working on small, independent curatorial projects. Hertling has authored texts on artists and art. Texts include a short essay in the catalogue for modern at the Chelsea Art Museum, an interview with Jonathan Horowitz for an exhibition at Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee, UK, an essay for a Hayley Tompkins catalogue published by the Inverleith House, Edinburgh, UK and a review of a Collier Schorr exhibition in Berlin for V Magazine. She is currently working on a publication on Art Law.

Pati Hertling worked with Hilton Als.

Darren Jones is an artist, curator and writer from Scotland, now based in New York. As an artist he has exhibited in over 80 exhibitions including the 2010 Moscow Biennial for Young Art as and the 2009 Queens International Biennial at the Queens Museum, NY. He remains an independent curator and is currently working on several exhibitions including the largest survey of Scottish contemporary art ever to be shown in New York. Jones is a contributing critic for ArtUS Magazine.

Darren Jones worked with Jonathan Katz.

A 2010 Pushcart Prize Nominee, Saeed Jones’ poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in publications like Hayden’s Ferry Review, StorySouth, Jubilat, West Branch, Weave, The Collagist & Line Break.

Saeed Jones worked with Sarah Schulman.

Xavier Marrades is a filmmaker born in Barcelona in 1979. His works are primarily documentaries and are influenced by his strong photographic and musical background.

Xavier Marrades worked with Barbara Hammer.

The films Edward has produced or directed have aired on cable television and screened at festivals all over the world including: Telluride, Outfest, Newfest, 38th Annual Student Academy Awards, Slamdace, Palm Springs, Woodstock, Cinequest, Clermont-Ferrand, and Gen Art.

Edward McDonald worked with Jennie Livingston.

Tommy Pico is author of IRL (Birds LLC, 2016) and Nature Poem (Tin House Books, 2017). Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, he now lives in Brooklyn where he co-curates the reading series Poets With Attitude (PWA) with Morgan Parker.

Tommy Pico worked with Pamela Sneed.

Harrison David Rivers is a Kansas born New York based playwright. His work has been developed and produced at The American Airlines Theater on Broadway, Lincoln Center, Atlantic Theater, the Lucille Lortel Theater, New York Theatre Workshop, Second Stage, the McGinn-Cazale Theater, Atlantic Stage 2, Joe’s Pub, Ars Nova, HERE Arts Center, the 45th Street Theater, Dixon Place, 3LD Art & Technology Center, the Williamstown Theatre Festival and the Sundance Theater Lab on Governor’s Island.

Harrison Rivers worked with John Kelly.

Guadalupe Rosales is a New York based artist. Her most recent projects take the form of installation, sculpture, textiles, costuming, drawing, and collaborating.

Guadalupe Rosales worked with Louise Fishman.

Jacolby Satterwhite is a multimedia artist born in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s recieved residencies at Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture, Harvestworks, Center For Photography at Woodstock and Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship in Provincetown.

Jacolby Satterwhite worked with Angela Dufresne.

Justin Sayre is an actor, writer and director based in New York. As an actor, he has worked and studied with some of the finest professionals in New York, including Michael Howard, Austin Pendleton and Joanna Merlin. As a gay, Justin has excelled at scarf placement, Judy hands, and a healthy but firm love of the American musical.

Justin Sayre worked with Everett Quinton.

Aldrin Valdez is a painter and writer based in New York City. Valdez is a Contributing Writer for ArtSlant and has been published in the Brooklyn Rail. Valdez is co-founder of Foundational Sharing, a series of queer readings, performances, and publications, with artist and organizer Ted Kerr.

Aldrin Valdez worked with Deborah Kass.

Matt Wolf is the director of “Wild Combination,” the acclaimed documentary about the queer avant-garde cellist and disco producer Arthur Russell. 

Stacy Szymaszek is a poet, editor and arts administrator. She is the author of the books Emptied of All Ships (2005) and Hyperglossia (2009), both published by Litmus Press, as well as numerous chapbooks, including Pasolini Poems (Cy Press, 2005), Orizaba: A Voyage with Hart Crane (Faux Press, 2008), Stacy S.: Autoportraits (OMG, 2008), from Hart Island (Albion Books, 2009) and austerity measures (Fewer & Further Press, 2012).

Recently described as “The greatest cabaret artist of (v’s) generation” by Hilton Als in the New Yorker, singer, songwriter and Tony-nominated performance artist Mx Justin Vivian Bond, is an Obie, Bessie and Ethyl Eichelberger Award winner.

Nicole Eisenman has been living and working in New York for the last 20 years. She began in New York as a commercial mural painter and had her first show in 1992 at Nicola Tyson’s now infamous project space, Trial Balloon, New York, NY. 

Hilton Als became a staff writer at The New Yorker in October, 1994, and a theatre critic in 2002. He began contributing to the magazine in 1989, writing pieces for The Talk of the Town.

Jonathan David Katz is the former executive coordinator of the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale University. He is a former chair of the Department of Lesbian and Gay studies at the City College of San Francisco, and was the first tenured faculty in gay and lesbian studies in the United States.

Sarah Schulman’s 18 books include the 2016 novel The Cosmopolitans, which Kirkus called “A Modern Classic.” Her new nonfiction book, forthcoming in October, is “Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility and the Duty of Repair.” A playwright, screenwriter, journalist and AIDS historian, Sarah is co-founder of MIX: NYC Queer Experimental Film Festival, now in its 30th year. Her awards include a Guggenheim (Playwrighting), Fulbright (Judaic Studies) and the Kessler Prize for Significant Contribution to LGBT Studies.

Barbara Hammer is a visual artist working primarily in film and video, installation, photography and performance.  She has made over 80 moving image works in a career that spans 40 years. She is considered a pioneer of queer cinema. 

Jennie Livingston describes her 35mm dramatic short Who’s the Top? (2005) as “Woody Allen’s younger dyke sister goes to the s/m dungeon…with musical numbers.” 

Pamela Sneed is a New York-based poet, writer and actress. She has been featured in the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Time Out, Bomb, VIBE, and on the cover of New York Magazine. In 2015, she appeared inArt Forum and The Huffington Post. At current, she teaches in the department of Journalism and Communication at LIU and is online faculty at Chicago’s School of the Art Institute teaching Human Rights and Writing Art. In 2016, She performed at the Poetry Project, NYU and Pratt Universities, Smack Mellon Gallery, was an artist- in- residence at Poet-Linc, Lincoln Center Education, and directed a final showcase at Lincoln Center Atrium. Her forthcoming Chapbook, Sweet Dreams, will be published by Belladonna in 2017.

John Kelly is an experimental theater artist who, as author, choreographer, director, visual artist, and performer, creates solo and ensemble mixed media performance works.

Louise Fishman was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on January 14, 1939. She is recognized as one of the best known American abstract painters of her generation. Her painting style at first gave her some trouble in being recognized.

Angela Dufresne was born in Hartford CT to Polish, Irish, French and Italian Catholics in 1969. She was raised in Olathe, Kansas, the town where Dick and Perry stopped in before they went on the kill the Clutters. She was the first of her family linage to get a college degree.

Everett Quinton was a member of The Ridiculous Theatrical Company and served as its Artistic Director from 1987-1997. He has appeared in Charles Ludlam’s Medea, The Secret Lives of the Sexists, Salammbo, Galas, The Artificial Jungle and the original production of The Mystery of Irma Vep (Obie and Drama Desk Award).

Deborah Kass is an artist whose paintings examine the intersection of art history, popular culture and the self.