Queer|Art Announces 2022 Queer|Art|Mentorship Fellows

Queer|Art has announced the twelve Fellows accepted for the 2022 Queer|Art|Mentorship program cycle, and the Mentors with whom they will be working:

Jose Abad with Mentor, Will Rawls (Performance)

JL Akagi with Mentor, Torrey Peters (Literature)

Frances Arpaia with Mentor, Angelo Madsen Minax (Film)

Mariam Bazeed with Mentor, Morgan Bassichis (Performance)

Clarissa Brooks with Mentor, Saeed Jones (Literature)

Antonius-Tin Bui with Mentor, Lola Flash (Visual Art)

Kei Kaimana with Mentor, Alexis De Veaux (Literature)

Ute Petit with Mentor, Jeffrey Gibson (Visual Art)

Xoài Pham with Mentor, Tourmaline (Film)

Joie Lou Shakur with Mentor, Silas Howard (Film)

Anh Vo with Mentor, Julie Tolentino (Performance)

Agustine Zegers with Mentor, Constantina Zavitsanos (Visual Art)

Now in its 11th year, the organization's celebrated year-long creative and professional development program expands nationally for the first time, supporting both remote and in-person participation between early-career and established LGBTQ+ artists from across the country. In expanding nationally, Queer|Art|Mentorship bridges professional and social thresholds that often isolate artists by generation, discipline, and region. The 2022 cohort is made up of Mentors and Fellows participating across ten states: California, Connecticut, Georgia, Louisiana, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Vermont, and Virginia.

The program supports a year-long exchange between emerging and established LGBTQ+ artists across four distinct fields-Film, Literature, Performance, and Visual Art. Fellows apply with a specific project they would like to work on during the program and meet each month with their Mentors to discuss their progress in the lead-up to this event. Fellows also meet each month as a group to learn from and provide support for one another throughout the year.

For the last decade, Queer|Art|Mentorship has nurtured the creative and professional development of over 179 artists and propelled the careers of a new generation of creators. Alumni of the program include: Camilo Godoy, Ryan J. Haddad, Saeed Jones, Jeanne Vaccaro, Geo Wyeth, April Freely, Tourmaline, Sasha Wortzel, Jess Barbagallo, Morgan Bassichis, Monstah Black, Yve Laris Cohen, Troy Michie, Angelo Madsen Minax, Tommy Pico, Justin Sayre, Eva Reign, Jacolby Satterwhite, Guadalupe Rosales, and Hugh Ryan, among many others.

Details about the projects each Fellow will be working on are provided below.

About the 2020-2021 Queer|Art|Mentorship Fellows and Their Projects

Film

Frances Arpaia (Brooklyn, NY) is a queer trans woman making films which explore everything from queer life in Brooklyn and the struggles of community and connection, to experimental performance pieces and video-art shitposts. Arpaia will be working with Mentor, Angelo Madsen Minax (Brooklyn, NY) on an experimental documentary that examines the Sapphic gaze between the Statue of Liberty and the statue of Minerva in Brooklyn's Greenwood Cemetery, who was specifically placed there to face Liberty in eternal longing.

Xoài Pham (Brooklyn, NY) is a Vietnamese trans woman descended from a long legacy of warriors, healers, and shamans whose life's work is in dreaming new futures where we are all limitless. Pham will be working with Mentor, Tourmaline (Brooklyn, NY) on a series juxtaposing the intricate, tangled relationships among trans women immigrants in New York City and the relationship they share with the criminal legal system.

Joie Lou Shakur (Durham, NC) is a southern storyteller, medicine maker, village organizer, and the Founding Director of House of Pentacles, a Film Fellowship Program and Production House focused on cultural organizing and narrative power led by and for Black Trans and Gender Non-Conforming people. Shakur will be working with Mentor, Silas Howard (Los Angeles, CA) on an experimental short film which offers a glimpse into the shadow world of Black Trans youth living with the trauma of parental abandonment, and the loving connections that it takes to heal and come home to ourselves.

Literature

JL Akagi (Brooklyn, NY) is a Japanese American writer who blends elements of Japanese folklore and narrative structures into Western genres-and is particularly interested in queer possibility and the ways that radical, joyful queerness can provide antidotes for suffering. Akagi will be working with Mentor, Torrey Peters (New York/Vermont) on a speculative novella that explores the fetishization and appropriation of Asian bodies in late stage capitalism.

Clarissa Brooks (Atlanta, GA) is a writer, journalist, and cultural worker using a Black queer feminist lens to approach her cultural criticism and investigative reporting on topics such as hip-hop, black political power, and the varying cruel conditions Black women and girls survive every day. Brooks will be working with Mentor, Saeed Jones (Columbus, OH) on an investigative report on sexual violence at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

Kei Kaimana (Ann Arbor, MI) is a disabled nonbinary trans writer, independent scholar, and artist of Kanaka Maoli and Black descent. Kaimana will be working with Mentor, Alexis De Veaux (New Orleans, LA) on a work of visionary fiction that asks the reader to imagine simultaneous realities where mothering is multidimensional, gods can be forgetful, and computers conspire with ghosts.

Performance

jose esteban abad (San Francisco, CA) is an Afro-Carribean Filipinx choreographer, DJ, and curator whose work centers experimental collective process-based practices of becoming and remembering. abad will be working with Mentor, Will Rawls (New York, NY) on a multimedia performance piece exploring the expansiveness and future of Black life in the diaspora, rooted in the Black Radical Tradition of experimentation, improvisation, collaboration, and intergenerational wisdom circles.

Mariam Bazeed (Brooklyn, NY) is an Egyptian immigrant, performance artist, stage actor, cook, and alliteration-leaning writer of prose, poetry, plays, and pantry lists. Bazeed will be working with Mentor, Morgan Bassichis (Brooklyn, NY) on a solo cabaret comprised of melodies from British standards, sponsored by late-stage capitalist algorithms, with lyrics rewritten to reflect the daily realities of Gulf Labor dystopia.

Anh Vo (Brooklyn, NY) is a Vietnamese dancer, writer, teacher, and activist. creating work about pornography and queer relations, being and form, identity and abstraction, and about history and its colonial reality. Vo will be working with Mentor, Julie Tolentino (Joshua Tree, CA) on a color duology pairing Vietnamese red music and yellow music to summon the ideological death of communism and the death of the artist's grandfather, the only communist in their family.

Visual Art

Antonius-Tin Bui (New Haven, CT) is a nonbinary shapeshifter in both identity and artistic practice, using hand-cut paper, performance, soft sculpture, and community engagement to visualize hybrid identities and histories that confront the unsettling present. Bui will be working with Mentor, Lola Flash (New York, NY) to visually explore Asian Pacific Islander American Futurism through photography, speculation, and interviews.

Ut?" Petit (New Orleans, LA) is an artist, transit, geography, and plant nerd working within their family's ancestral roles as quilters and farmers. Petit will be working with Mentor, Jeffrey Gibson (Hudson, NY) to steward the lot where her great grandmother's house floated away during Hurricane Katrina, transforming it into an Afro-Indigenous edible landscape, sculpture, playground, and energy park.

agustine zegers (Richmond, VA) is a Chilean artist, writer, and bacterial community whose work uses text, olfaction, and ritual to comprehend and commune with flows of ecological collapse and to question the pervasive systems that produce them. zegers will be working with Mentor, Constantina Zavitsanos (Brooklyn, NY) on a series of olfactory art pieces, creating wearable fragrances that respond to ecological disaster scenarios.

For more information about Queer|Art|Mentorship and our new cohort of Fellows and Mentors, please visit our website at: www.queer-art.org/mentorship.