Kate Bornstein And Thomas Lax Amongst New Mentors For The 2019-2020 Queer|Art|Mentorship Program Cycle

Queer|Art, NYC's home for the creative and professional development of LGBTQ+ artists, is pleased to announce the new Mentors for the 2019-2020 program cycle of Queer|Art|Mentorship (QAM). Applications open May 12th.The Mentorship program is the cornerstone of Queer|Art's activity, providing a platform of support for LGBTQ+ artists focused on creative issues and long-term sustainability of artistic practice. Over the course of a year-long exchange, the program helps to forge new relationships between early-career and established LGBTQ+ artists and curators, bridging professional and social thresholds that often isolate artists by generation and discipline.

This year Queer|Art proudly welcomes Thomas Lax, Curator of Media and Performance at the Museum of Modern Art (Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done), as Mentor for Curatorial Practice; and legendary gender theorist, author, and activist Kate Bornstein (Gender Outlaw; My Gender Workbook) as Mentor for Literature.

Other new Mentors joining the program include: photographer and activist Lola Flash; choreographer and community organizer Maria Bauman-Morales; documentary filmmaker Hao Wu (People's Republic of Desire); and writer and scholar Gayatri Gopinath (Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures and Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora).

Queer|Art is also proud to introduce two Mentors this year who are themselves alumni of the Mentorship program: visual artist Yve Laris Cohen (who was previously mentored by cabaret performance artist Justin Vivian Bond in the inaugural year of the program); and filmmaker, playwright, and producer Rodrigo Bellott (who was previously mentored by filmmaker Silas Howard).

Returning Mentors include: author and organizer Charles Rice-Gonzalez (Co-founder of BAAD! The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance) and playwright Mashuq Mushtaq Deen (Draw The Circle).

Image credits, clockwise from top left: Lola Flash, image by Becci Manson; Gayatri Gopinath, image courtesy of the artist; Yve Laris Cohen, image by Paula Court; Maria Bauman-Morales, image by Thomas Dunn; Rodrigo Bellott, image courtesy of the artist; Hao Wu, image courtesy of the artist; Kate Bornstein, image courtesy of the artist; Mashuq Mushtaq Deen, image courtesy of the artist; Charles Rice-González, image by Marisol Diaz; Thomas Lax, image by Paul Mpagi Sepuya

Queer|Art|Mentorship (QAM) was launched in 2011 to establish an intergenerational and interdisciplinary network of support and shared knowledge for LGBTQ+ artists. Now entering its ninth year, QAM has graduated 80 Fellows, with 51 Mentors, producing a diverse and vibrant community of filmmakers, authors, performers, visual artists, and curators. The program's enduring success is in the many creative and professional relationships it has nurtured, which continue to propel the careers of a new generation of artists.

Every Fall, QAM welcomes 10 new Fellows in Film, Literature, Performance, Visual Art, and Curatorial Practice. Throughout their year together, Fellows work closely with their Mentors and cohort to develop new creative projects and advance their professional development. Their work together culminates with an exhibition known as The QAM Annual, the largest public event organized by Queer|Art each year.

Artists supported through QAM have gone on to present their work at such prestigious venues as The Whitney Museum, New Museum, Queens Museum, Bronx Museum of Art, The Studio Museum of Harlem, Hammer Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art - San Diego, Sundance Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, BAM Cinematheque, The Public Theater, The Kitchen, Performance Space New York (PS122), Abrons Arts Center, Danspace, and White Columns, and have received residencies and fellowships from Jerome Foundation, MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo, among others.

Following a two-month application period, each Mentor will work with Queer|Art staff to select a Fellow within their respective field of creative practice. Fellows apply with a specific project they would like to work on during the program and, once accepted, meet with their Mentors monthly to discuss their progress. Each cycle of the Mentorship program begins in October and ends thirteen months later in October of the following year. The QAM Annual exhibition, a culminating showcase of the Fellows' work in the program, is presented November - December.

The timeline for Queer|Art|Mentorship is as follows:

Applications open: May 12, 2019
Intent to Apply Deadline: June 1, 2019
Application Deadline: July 18, 2019
Program Begins: October 2019
Program Ends: October 2020
QAM Annual exhibition on view: November - December 2020

The steady growth in volume of applications received during the first eight years of the program (numbering more than 140 last year) speaks to the important role Queer|Art|Mentorship performs within the arts community, as well as to the need of such programs in the face of an ongoing lack of traditional institutional and economic support for the creation of LGBTQ work. Prospective Fellows who are interested to apply should visit www.queer-art.org/mentorship for more information about the program, Mentors, and application instructions. Full bios for each Mentor are included below.

The 2019-2020 Queer|Art|Mentorship Mentors by Field

FILM

Rodrigo Bellott (Filmmaker, Playwright, and Producer; Director and writer of Tu Me Manques, currently being adapted for Broadway; Founder of Bolivian BOLD Inc.)

Hao Wu (Documentary Filmmaker; Director of People's Republic of Desire and All in My Family, launching globally on Netflix in May 2019)

LITERATURE

Kate Bornstein (Writer; Author of seven award-winning books including Gender Outlaw, A Queer and Pleasant Danger, and Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws; Recipient of two citations of honor from the New York City Council)

Gayatri Gopinath (Writer and Scholar; Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University; Author of Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures and Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora)

Charles Rice-González (Writer; Winner of Stonewall Book Awards - Barbara Gittings Literature Award Honor from the American Library Association; Co-founder of BAAD! The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance)

PERFORMANCE

Mashuq Mushtaq Deen (Resident playwright at New Dramatists, class of 2022; MacDowell Colony's Arch and Bruce Brown Fellow, 2015-16; New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow)

Maria Bauman-Morales (2017 Bessie Award Winner for Outstanding Performance, skeleton architecture; Winner of 2019 BAX Arts in Progress Award; Founder of MBDance and ACRE, Artists Co-creating Real Equity)

VISUAL ART

Lola Flash (Photographer; Former resident at Light Work, the Art Matters Foundation, and Alice Yard; early AIDS activist and photographer of the ACT UP movement)

Yve Laris Cohen (Participating artist in 2014 Whitney Biennial; Recipient of 2016 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant to Artists; Co-facilitator of Dance and Process at The Kitchen)

CURATORIAL PRACTICE

Thomas Lax (Curator and Writer; Curator of Media and Performance at the Museum of Modern Art; Board Member at Danspace Project and Professor at Wesleyan University; Winner of Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement; 2017 Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellow)

About the Queer|Art|Mentorship 2019-2020 Mentors

Maria Bauman-Morales is a NY-based "Bessie" award winning (Outstanding Performance, skeleton architecture) multi-disciplinary artist and community organizer. She creates bold and intimate artworks for her company, MBDance, via dream-mapping and nuanced, powerful physicality. Centering non-linear stories, bodies and musings of queer people of color, she draws on her studies of English literature, capoeira, improvisation, dancing in living rooms and nightclubs and concert dance classes to emphasize ancestors, imagination, and Spirit while embodying inter-dependence. Maria is a 2018-19 UBW Choreographic Center Fellowship Candidate, 2017-19 Artist in Residence at Brooklyn Arts Exchange and was the 2017 Community Action Artist in Residence at Gibney Dance. She is also a co-founder of ACRE (Artists Co-creating Real Equity), undoing racism in arts fields, and was recently honored with a 2019 BAX Arts in Progress award for that work.

Rodrigo Bellott is a Bolivian filmmaker, playwright, and producer-and a 2015-2016 Queer|Art|Mentorship alum. His breakout hit Sexual Dependency marked the rebirth of Bolivian cinema as the country's first official submission for "Best Foreign Language Film" at the 2004 Academy Awards. Bellott's Who Killed the White Llama? was the most successful box-office hit in Bolivia's history, leading to Variety magazine naming him one of the Top Ten Latin American talents to watch in 2007. After receiving two masters degrees in screenwriting and directing at Binger Film Lab in Amsterdam in 2011, Bellott founded Bolivian BOLD Inc., a production company in New York City. At Queer|Art|Mentorship, Bellott worked with Mentor, filmmaker Silas Howard on the film adaptation of his play Tu Me Manques, which is now in post-production and stars Oscar Martinez and Rossy De Palma. Bellott is currently adapting Tu Me Manques for Broadway and is developing a new project at the New Museum.

Kate Bornstein is an author, actor, performance artist, and playwright who has for over thirty years written award-winning books on the subject of nonbinary gender. Both Gender Outlaw and My Gender Workbook are out in new editions that incorporate 30 years of advances in gender theory and activism since they were first written. Additionally, Kate maintains a career in theater, making her Broadway debut in the summer of 2018, co-starring in the Second Stage Theater's production of Young Jean Lee's Straight White Men. Kate's 2006 book, Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws propelled Kate into an international position of advocacy for marginalized youth. She has earned two citations of honor from the New York City Council. Kate has donated her collected papers to Brown University, where they will be archived and available for research at both the John Hay Library and The Pembroke Center.

Mashuq Mushtaq Deen is a resident playwright at New Dramatists and a 2019 Lambda Literary Award Finalist. His full-length plays include Flood, The Betterment Society, The Shaking Earth, Draw the Circle (productions: PlayMakers Rep, Mosaic Theatre, Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre; published: Dramatists Play Service), and Tank & Horse (world premiere at the Berkshire Fringe Festival). Deen's work has been supported by a number of institutions including Sundance Institute/Ucross, Blue Mountain Center, The Public Theater, NYTW, MacDowell Colony, Bogliasco Foundation, Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Target Margin Theatre, Keen Company, New Harmony Project, Phoenix Theatre, Chesley/Bumbalo Foundation, Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, InterAct Theatre, Page73, Ma-Yi, and others. He is a member of the NYTW Usual Suspects, Ma-Yi Writers Lab, founding member of The Public Theater Alumni Writers Group, and the Dramatists Guild. He is represented by the Gurman Agency.

Lola Flash uses photography to challenge stereotypes and offer new ways of seeing that transcend and interrogate gender, sexual, and racial norms. Flash works primarily in portraiture with a 4x5 film camera, engaging those who are often deemed invisible. She earned a BA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and a MA from the London College of Printing. Flash has received residencies from Light Work, the Art Matters Foundation, and Alice Yard. Flash has work included in important public collections such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Brooklyn Museum. Her work is also featured in the publication Posing Beauty, edited by Deb Willis, currently on exhibit across the US. In 2016, she co-led a talk at the Bronx Museum with Sur Rodney Sur. They spoke to the glaring lack of women artists and artists of color, with respect to the Art AIDS America exhibition. Pen + Brush Gallery's inaugural exhibition in 2018 featured a 30 year retrospective of her significant photographs.

Gayatri Gopinath is Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, and the Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University. She works at the intersection of transnational feminist and queer studies, postcolonial studies, and diaspora studies, and is the author of two monographs: Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Duke UP, 2005), and Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora (Duke UP, 2018). She has published numerous essays on gender, sexuality, and queer diasporic cultural production in journals such as Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, GLQ, Social Text, and positions.

Yve Laris Cohen's work has been presented and commissioned by The Kitchen, SculptureCenter, Dance Theater Workshop, Company Gallery, Murray Guy, Abrons Arts Center, Recess, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Danspace Project, Thomas Erben Gallery, Performance Space New York, and the 2014 Whitney Biennial, in New York; Hessel Museum of Art, CCS Bard; the Institute for Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Laris Cohen has received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant to Artists (2016), a Franklin Furnace Fund Grant (2015), and the Rema Hort Mann Foundation's Emerging Artist Award (2011). He has held teaching appointments at The Cooper Union, New York University, and The New School, and co-facilitates Dance and Process at The Kitchen. Laris Cohen graduated with a BA from the University of California, Berkeley and an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University.

Thomas J. Lax is a writer and an interlocutor and holds the title of Curator of Media and Performance at the Museum of Modern Art. He recently co-organized the exhibition Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done with Ana Janevski and Martha Joseph and is working with colleagues across the Museum on a major rehang of the collection to open in 2019. Previously, he worked at the Studio Museum in Harlem for seven years. Thomas is on the board of Danspace Project and teaches at Wesleyan University. He is on the advisory committees of Contemporary And, The Laundromat Project, Participant Inc., and Recess Assembly. A native New Yorker, Thomas holds degrees in Africana Studies and Art History from Brown University and Columbia University. In 2015, he was awarded the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement and he was a 2017 Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellow.

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.

Hao Wu is a technology executive-turned-filmmaker who recently directed the documentary feature film People's Republic of Desire. His work takes a raw and human approach to storytelling within an era of evolving online culture and transnationalism. His documentary films have received support from Ford Foundation JustFilms, ITS, Sundance, Tribeca, and international broadcasters. People's Republic of Desire contemplates internet fame and social isolation through a look into China's culture of competitive live-streaming. The film has gone on to win numerous awards including the Grand Jury Award for documentary film at the 2018 SXSW festival. Wu's documentary short about his personal journey to build a "modern" family via surrogacy, titled All in My Family, is launching globally on Netflix in May 2019.

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