Queer|Art Announces The 2025 Queer|Art|Mentorship Fellows

Queer|Art has announced the new Fellows for the 2025 Queer|Art|Mentorship (QAM) program cycle. The Mentorship program is the cornerstone of Queer|Art's work, providing a platform of support for LGBTQ+ artists focused on creative issues and long-term sustainability of artistic practice.

Now in its 14th year, the organization's celebrated year-long creative and professional development program supports both remote and in-person participation between early-career and established LGBTQ+ artists from across the country. In doing so, Queer|Art|Mentorship bridges professional and social thresholds that often isolate artists by generation, discipline, and region. The 2025 cohort is made up of Mentors and Fellows participating across seven states: New York, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Illinois, California, Alaska, and Georgia.

The twelve Fellows accepted for the 2025 Queer|Art|Mentorship program cycle, and the Mentors with whom they will be working, are:

Nathan Storey with Mentor, Ken Gonzales-Day (Visual Art)
Francheska Alcántara with Mentor, Liz Collins (Visual Art)
RIDIKKULUZ with Mentor, Chitra Ganesh (Visual Art)
AZ Espinoza with Mentor, Raja Feather Kelly (Performance)
SUNGJAE LEE with Mentor, Young Joon Kwak (Performance)
Reed Rushes with Mentor, Erin Markey (Performance)
Lee Painter-Kim with Mentor, Alexander Chee (Literature)
Ray Levy Uyeda with Mentor, Stacy Szymaszek (Literature)
MK Thekkumkattil with Mentor, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (Literature)
Yash Zhang with Mentor, Frédéric Tcheng (Film)
Saudade Toxosi with Mentor, Tabitha Jackson (Film) 
Jovan James with Mentor, Andrew Ahn (Film)

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

About the 2025 Queer|Art|Mentorship Fellows and Their Projects

Visual Art

Nathan Storey (he/him) is an interdisciplinary artist living between Southern California and Colorado working in photography, installation, and printmaking. With Mentor Ken Gonzales-Day, he will be developing an artist-run, experimental press, platform, and project space for historically underrepresented visual artists who explore, cultivate, and expand queer print culture.

Francheska Alcántara (they/them) is a queer Afro-Caribbean interdisciplinary artist raised by a village of people in community and based in The Bronx, NY. They will work with Mentor Liz Collins on a series of concrete- and soap-casted brown paper bag sculptures, collaged with artifacts from railroad and subway tracks from places the artist has lived.

RIDIKKULUZ (any pronouns) is a Palestinian, Egyptian, and Jordanian multidisciplinary artist from New York City. They will work with Mentor Chitra Ganesh on a series of sculptures and paintings that amplifies Queer Palestinian Resistance while exploring themes of grief and liberation.

Literature

Lee Painter-Kim (they/them) is a multidisciplinary writer and cultural producer with a background in cultural studies, art history, and English literature. Exploring queer biracial Korean American identity through the artist's family's history and the GyoDong dokkaebi market, they will work with Mentor Alexander Chee to examine the cultural dynamics of US-ROK relations and highlight the intersection of commerce and demilitarization. 

Ray Levy Uyeda (any pronouns) is a poet, writer, photographer and amateur archivist based in the Bay Area, CA. Working with Mentor Stacy Szymaszek, they will develop their debut collection of poetry, Against Infinity, which explores queer eco poetics, climate change, kinship, memory, documentation, and (self) identification.

M. K. Thekkumkattil (they/them) is a trans disabled writer and nurse. They will work with Mentor Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha on an essay collection exploring the complexities, tensions, and systemic failures within Critical Care nursing as a microcosm of the medical industrial complex at large, while also envisioning care work futures.

Performance

AZ Espinoza (they/them) is an afro-futurist- trans-masculine-feminist making magic through theatre. With the help of Mentor Raja Feather Kelly, they will create an adaptive confrontation of King Lear, in which Cord(elia) must survive a world where his aging hotelier father thinks he's a daughter not a son, and a catastrophic hurricane is headed straight to their family's island resort.

SUNGJAE LEE (he/they) is a Seoul-born, Chicago-based visual artist, educator, and writer whose practice centers around the visibility and varied representations of queer Asians. He will work with Mentor Young Joon Kwak on a performance-based video installation of chest hair transplanting services between himself and white men, exploring themes of Christian rituals, racialized human labor, and liberation of queer Asian bodies.

Reed Rushes (they/them) is a British-American performance artist living and working in Queens, NY. With Mentor Erin Markey, they will create a multimedia queer ensemble performance that delves into the fantasy world of their drag king persona, Stan. Using drag, choreography and video the performance will disrupt notions of interiority and exteriority manifesting instead a psychological dream state.

Film

Yifei "Yash" Zhang (he/they) is a Chinese filmmaker and artist whose work explores queerness, fluidity, mental health, and futurity. Under the guidance of Mentor Frédéric Tcheng, he will reconnect with his divorced mother on a train journey through their hometown to revive their shared family traumas, years of depression experiences, and gender struggles that have long silenced them.

Saudade Toxosi (she/ze) is a psycho-spiritual visual artist engaged in a meditative process of selecting and organizing found images that articulate her thoughts about the “new indigenous african'' experience in the United States. She will work with Mentor Tabitha Jackson on an experimental documentary film told by nature and spatial environments that surrounded the families and neighborhoods of missing and murdered children in Atlanta.

Jovan Avery James (he/him) is a Los Angeles-based African-American writer, director, and producer born and raised in Baltimore, MD. He will work with Mentor Andrew Ahn on a coming-of-age feature film following a working-class Black, queer man whose desire to leave his small town and follow his big city artistic dreams is threatened by his perilous family ties and a lack of confidence.

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