Queer|Art announces new mentors for 2024 Queer|Art|Mentorship program cycle

(Image credits, clockwise from top left: 1. Kate Bornstein, image by Jess Dugan; 2. Demian DinéYazhi’, image courtesy of the artist; 3. Jackie Ess, image courtesy of the artist; 4. Avram Finkelstein, image by Alina Oswald; 5. Eva Yaa Asantewaa, image by D. Feller; 6. Stephen Winter, image courtesy of the artist; 7. Ira Sachs, image courtesy of the artist; 8. M. Lamar, image courtesy of the artist.)

2024 Mentors Include M. Lamar, Kate Bornstein, Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Avram Finkelstein, and More

Queer|Art, NYC’s home for the creative and professional development of LGBTQ+ artists, is pleased to announce the new Mentors for the 2024 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 13th 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 national cohort of 2024 Mentors are based variously across the country. Queer|Art proudly welcomes four new Mentors to the program: interdisciplinary composer and performer M. Lamar; writer, curator, and community educator Eva Yaa Asantewaa; novelist and founder of the Bay Area Trans Writers Workshop Jackie Ess (Darryl); and transdisciplinary artist and activist Demian DinéYazhi’. We are also proud to welcome back four returning Mentors, including: author, playwright, and gender theorist Kate Bornstein (Gender Outlaw, A Queer and Pleasant Danger); artist, activist, and writer Avram Finkelstein (Gran Fury, Silence=Death Collective); filmmaker and writer Ira Sachs (The Delta, Love is Strange, Passages); and filmmaker, writer, and artist Stephen Winter (Chocolate Babies, Jason and Shirley).

Applications are open through July 30th. Learn more at www.queer-art.org/mentorship 

The 2024 Queer|Art|Mentorship Mentors by Field

FILM

Ira Sachs / NY (Director, writer, filmmaker; Passages, 2023; Love is Strange, 2014; Forty Shades of Blue, 2004; Married Life, 2008; Keep the Lights On, 2012)

Stephen Winter / NY (Filmmaker, writer, artist; Chocolate Babies, 1996; Jason and Shirley, 2015; Bad Friend, 2018; The Space Within, 2023; Adventures in New America, 2018)

LITERATURE

Kate Bornstein / RI (Author, playwright, actor, gender theorist; Gender Outlaw, 1994; A Queer and Pleasant Danger, 2012; Hidden: A Gender, 1989; Hello, Cruel World, 2009)

Jackie Ess / NY (Writer, novelist, and co-founder of the Bay Area Trans Writers Workshop; We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, 2020; Darryl, 2021) 

PERFORMANCE

Eva Yaa Asantewaa / NY (Writer, curator, community educator; Senior Director of Curation, Gibney Dance, 2018-2021; recipient of the Bessie Award for Outstanding Service to the Field of Dance, 2017; founder of Black Curators in Dance and Performance)

M. Lamar / NY (Interdisciplinary performer, composer, activist; Lordship and Bondage: The Birth of the Negro Superman, The Cloisters, 2019; The Voice in Three Acts, MoMA PS1, 2015; NEGROGOTHIC, A Manifesto, The Aesthetics of M. Lamar Participant Inc., 2014)

VISUAL ART

Avram Finkelstein / NY (Artist, activist, writer; Dedications, NYC AIDS Memorial, 2023; You Care About HIV Criminalization, You Just Don’t Know It Yet, VisualAIDS, 2018; founding member of Gran Fury & the Silence=Death Collective)

Demian DinéYazhi’ / OR (Artist, writer, curator; A Nation is a Massacre, Pioneer Works, 2018; Between the Waters, Whitney Museum of American Art, 2018; Ancestral Memory, 2016; An Infected Sunset, 2016)

About Queer|Art|Mentorship

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 thirteenth year, QAM has graduated 130 Fellows, with 76 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 8-12 new Fellows in Film, Literature, Performance, and Visual Art. Throughout their year together, Fellows work closely with their Mentors and cohort to develop new creative projects and advance their professional development.

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. 

The 2024 Queer|Art|Mentorship Program Cycle

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. The 2024 cycle of the Mentorship program begins in January and ends 10 months later in October.

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

• Applications open: May 18, 2023
• Application Deadline: July 30, 2023
• Applicants Notified: November 2023
• Program Begins: January 2024
• Program Ends: October 2024

The steady growth in volume of applications received during the first ten years of the program (numbering more than 320 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. 

About the Queer|Art|Mentorship 2024 Mentors 

Since the mid 1980s, Kate Bornstein has been writing about nonbinary gender in theory, fiction, and memoir. Bornstein is a trans elder whose art and activism have been in service to gender anarchy, and sex positivity. Her books, Gender Outlaw, My New Gender Workbook, and A Queer and Pleasant Danger are taught in colleges and high schools. Her collected papers are archived and available for research at Brown University, alongside the archived papers of her partner in life and art, Barbara Carrellas. Bornstein has been crisscrossing North America and Europe with solo performances, lectures, and workshops for over 30 years. A darling of 90’s tv talk shows, Kate was an audience favorite series regular on E! Tv’s reality show, I Am Cait. She maintains a career in theater, making their Broadway debut in the summer of 2018, and more recently appearing in a recurring role on NBC’s The Blacklist. She is a co-founder of and advisor to Island Queers, a support group for LGBTQ+ youth and young adults on Rhode Island’s south shore. She is currently writing fables, fairy tales, nursery rhymes, and fan fiction screenplays in collaboration with the artificial intelligence entities, GPT-4 and Pi.

Demian DinéYazhi´ (they/them) is an Indigenous Diné Non-Binary Trans transdisciplinary artist born to the clans Naasht’ézhí Tábaahá (Zuni Clan Water’s Edge) and Tódích’íí’nii (Bitter Water) living in Portland, OR. They received their BFA in Intermedia Arts from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2014, where they were awarded the Thesis Writing Award and the Intermedia Arts Department award for their curatorial project, Bury My Art At Wounded Knee: Blood and Guts in the Art School Industrial Complex. They are the founder of R.I.S.E.: Radical Indigenous Survivance & Empowerment, an activist initiative dedicated to the education and amplification of Indigenous art and culture. DinéYazhi´ is the founder of the Indigenous artist/activist initiative, R.I.S.E.: Radical Indigenous Survivance & Empowerment. They have recently exhibited at Portland Biennial, Honolulu Biennial, Biennale of Sydney, Vielmetter Los Angeles, Wexner Center for the Arts, Whitney Museum of American Art, Henry Art Gallery, Pioneer Works, CANADA, NY; and Cooley Art Gallery. They are the recipient of the Henry Art Museum’s Brink Award, Hallie Ford Fellow in the Visual Arts, and Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellow. DinéYazhi´ is the author of Ancestral Memory, An Infected Sunset, and We Left Them Nothing.

Jackie Ess (she/her) is a writer, novelist, and the author of Darryl (Clash, 2021). A co-founder of the Bay Area Trans Writers Workshop, her work can be found in Heavy Feather Review, the Zahir, the New Inquiry, Vetch, and the anthology We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics. Other than that, she’s making some effort to be a nice person. 

Avram Finkelstein (he/him) is an artist and writer, and a founding member of the Silence=Death and Gran Fury collectives. His work has shown at MoMA, the Whitney Museum, the New Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, David Zwirner, the Shed, the Museum of the City of New York, Kunsthal KAdE, and the Migros Museum, and is in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Whitney, the New Museum, the Metropolitan, the Victoria and Albert 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” was nominated for an International Center Of Photography 2018 Infinity Award in Critical Writing and Research. He has written for BOMB, frieze, Art21, and Foam, been interviewed by The New York Times, frieze, Artforum, NPR, Slate, and Interview, and spoken at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, and NYU.

M. Lamar (he/him) is a composer who works across opera, metal, performance, video, sculpture and installation to craft sprawling narratives of radical becoming. Lamar holds a BFA from The San Francisco Art Institute and attended the Yale School of Art, sculpture program, before dropping out to pursue music. Lamar’s work has been presented internationally, most recently at The Rewire Festival in The Hague, Trauma Bar Berlin, Atrium na Žižkově Prague, The Manhattan School of Music, Wellcome Collection London, The Cloisters at The Metropolitan Museum Of Art, Funkhaus Berlin Germany, Kunstgebäude Stuttgart, The Meet Factory in Prague, among others.

Ira Sachs (he/him) was born in 1965 in Memphis, Tennessee. His feature films include Passages, Frankie (Cannes, 2019), Little Men (Grand Prix, 2016 Deauville American Film Festival), Love is Strange, Keep the Lights On (Teddy Award, 2012 Berlinale), Forty Shades of Blue (Grand Jury Prize, 2005 Sundance) and his first feature, The Delta. A 2013 Guggenheim Fellow, as well as an artist resident at Yaddo and MacDowell, Sachs’s films are part of the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum and MoMA. A longtime Advisor at the Sundance Writers and Directors Labs, Sachs founded Queer|Art in 2009 and is an active member of the Queer|Art Board of Directors. 

Stephen Winter’s (he/him) debut feature film Chocolate Babies (1996) premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and won awards at Frameline, SXSW, UrbanWorld and OutFest. It is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel. Stephen’s second feature Jason and Shirley (2015) was called “one of the year’s finest” by Richard Brody (The New Yorker) and played AGO in Toronto and MoMA in New York. Stephen produced the landmark documentary Tarnation (2004, Jonathan Caouette). Other film collaborations include Lee Daniels, Allen Hughes, Xan Cassavetes, Howard Gertler and John Cameron Mitchell. Podcasts: Stephen co-created and directed the pioneering 2018 afro-futuristic satire Adventures in New America, which The New York Times compared to Boots Riley and Jordan Peele, He wrote the Spotify documentary Sound Barrier: Sylvester and directed the upcoming science-fiction drama The Space Within for Audible and Topic Studios starring Jessica Chastain, Ellen Burstyn, Michael Shannon, Bobby Canavale, Shea Whigham and Carmen Ejogo.

Eva Yaa Asantewaa (she/her) was born in New York of Barbadian immigrant heritage and lives in Lenapehoking/East Village. A veteran writer, editor, curator and community educator, she won the 2017 Bessie Award for Outstanding Service to the Field of Dance. Since 1976, she has contributed dance criticism and journalism to Dance Magazine, The Village Voice, and other publications including her blog, InfiniteBody. She podcasts at Body and Soul. In 2016, for Danspace Project’s Lost and Found platform, Ms. Yaa Asantewaa created the skeleton architecture, or the future of our worlds, an evening of group improvisation by 21 Black women and gender-nonconforming performers. That cast won a 2017 Bessie for Outstanding Performer. In 2018, Queer|Art named one of its awards in her honor, the Eva Yaa Asantewaa Grant for Queer Women(+) Dance Artists. She is Founding Director of Black Diaspora and founder of Black Curators in Dance and Performance. From 2018-2021, Ms. Yaa Asantewaa served as Senior Director of Curation as well as Editorial Director at Gibney.

About Queer|Art

Queer|Art connects and empowers LGBTQ+ artists across generations and creative disciplines. Founded in 2009, we are an artist-led and community-centered organization—united by shared values of collective care, creative resilience, and the preservation and advancement of queer legacies and queer futures. 

The devastating loss of a generation of artists to the ongoing AIDS pandemic has created a profound longing for cross-generational connections, mentorship, and community. Queer|Art serves as a ballast against this loss, seeking to highlight and address a continuing fundamental lack of both economic and institutional support for our community.

Ongoing programmatic initiatives include: our annual cornerstone program, the year-long Queer|Art|Mentorship; our long-running Queer|Art|Film series, sponsored by HBO at the IFC Center; and a wide array of awards, grants, and offerings that provide direct support to LGBTQ+ artists.

Website: www.queer-art.org
Instagram: @queerart