Morgan Bassichis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.