Queer|Art|Mentorship Announces 2018-2019 Mentors

Queer|Art|Mentorship was launched in 2011 to develop an intergenerational and interdisciplinary network of support and shared knowledge for LGBTQ artists. Now beginning its eighth year, the program brings together early-career and advanced-career artists for a year-long exchange across five different fields: Film, Literature, Performance, Visual Art, and Curatorial Practice.

The Mentors selected for the 2018-2019 program cycle represent a diverse and vibrant group of esteemed artists and curators whose work has made a tremendous impact across multiple sectors of the art world. Collectively, these individuals showcase a professional and cutting-edge approach to queer art production in New York City and beyond. The 2018-2019 Mentors are:

FILM
Elisabeth Subrin (Director and writer of A Woman, A Part and Shulie; Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media Arts at Temple University) and Frédéric Tcheng (Writer and director of Dior and I; Co-director of Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel)

LITERATURE
Che Gossett (Scholar and Critic; Winner of the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Award from the American Studies Association, and the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from the Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies at the City University of New York) and 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) and David Thomson (Performer and Choreographer; Bessie Award-winning dancer for Sustained Achievement and as part of the creative team for Bebe Miller's Landing/Place)

VISUAL ART
Nancy Brooks Brody (Visual artist; Founding member of the collective fierce p***y), C. Finley (Curator, Whitney Houston Biennial; Member of the artist collective HowDoYouSayYamInAfrican?), and Neil Goldberg (Guggenheim Fellow, Faculty at Yale School of Art and Parsons)

CURATORIAL PRACTICE
Nelson Santos (Artist, curator, and designer; Former Executive Director of Visual AIDS)

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. Fellows also meet each month as a group. In this way, the program nurtures exchange between artists at all levels of their careers and works against a natural segregation between generations and disciplines. At the culmination of the program, each fellow participates in a special exhibition, known as the QAM Annual. This annual exhibition showcases the progress of each Fellow's project and is organized across both live-event and gallery-based formats. Each cycle of the Mentorship program begins in October and ends in November of the following year.

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

Applications open: May 12, 2018

Intent to Apply Deadline: June 12, 2018

Application Deadline: July 18, 2018

Program Begins: October 2018

Program Ends: November 2019 (following the QAM Annual exhibition)

The steady growth in volume of applications received during the first seven 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.

Past Mentors

Queer|Art|Mentorship has graduated 69 Fellows, with 59 Mentors, in the past seven years, establishing a diverse and vibrant community of filmmakers, authors, performers, curators, and visual artists. 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.

Past Mentors have been presented by such prestigious venues as MoMA, MoMA PS1, The Whitney Museum, Art Basel Miami, Sundance Film Festival, Yaddo, White Columns, Abrons Art Center, Monya Rowe Gallery, The New Museum, The Kitchen, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Studio Museum, BAMcinématek, Berlin Film Festival, Hammer Museum, Hessel Museum of Art, among many others. Awards and Fellowships received by individual Mentors have included Creative Capital, Guggenheim Fellowship, Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Solo Performance, Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Solo Performance, Obie Award, Bessie Award, Ethyl Eichelberger Award, MacArthur Fellowship, Jerome Foundation Fellowship, Anonymous Was a Woman Award, Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant, among others.

About the Queer|Art|Mentorship 2018-2019 Mentors

Nancy Brooks Brody is a visual artist, whose work spans across media and materials, including painting, drawing, sculpture, and more recently site specific interventions. Brody's practice engages with process, materiality and perception. Brody has exhibited consistently since the early 1980s. The first group exhibition she participated in was at Club 57, curated by Keith Haring. She has shown at many galleries and institutions, including New Math, Andrea Rosen, Exit Art, Virgil de Voldere, Shane Campbell, the Brooklyn Museum, White Columns, FRAC Haute Normandie, Galerie Joseph Tang, and Greater New York, MoMA PS1. Her work is in the permanent collections at MOCA, Los Angeles as well as Trafic FRAC Haute-Normandie, Rouen, France and Fonds National d'Art Contemporain, FNAC Paris, France. Committed to social justice and activism, she was a member of ACT UP and is a founding member of the collective, fierce p***y.

Mashuq Mushtaq Deen is an award-winning, queer theater artist and a resident playwright at New Dramatists (class of 2022). His newest production "Draw the Circle" performed at Mosaic Theater and Rattlestick Theater. He is a MacDowell Colony's Arch and Bruce Brown Fellow (2015-16), and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow. About his work, Deen says, "I look at work with a queerlens, thinking about intersections of sexuality, gender, race, class, etc. I seek to confront inequalities of both power and dignity, challenging and complicating notions of right and wrong, of my side and your side, of self and other. I want to question assumed values, especially my own. I am particularly interested in the heroic journeys of the heart." Deen is also an activist in the LGBTQ community.

C. Finley is the curator of the Whitney Houston Biennial, which recently completed its second iteration. As an artist, Finley is known for her elaborate geometric paintings, skillful use of color, and her activism through street art. Previous projects include Wallpapered Dumpsters which has been featured in the New York Times, La Repubblica, the Huffington Post, NYLON Magazine, Dazed, andWomen's Wear Daily. As a member of the artist collective HowDoYouSayYamInAfrican?, she participated in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Finley received her BFA from the Pratt Institute, New York and her MFA from California State University, Long Beach.

Neil Goldberg makes video, photo, mixed media, and performance work that focuses on embodiment, sensing, mortality and the everyday. This work has been exhibited at venues including The Museum of Modern Art (permanent collection), The New Museum of Contemporary Art, The Museum of the City of New York, The Kitchen, and The Hammer Museum. Neil has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony, among others. He teaches at the Yale School of Art and Parsons, was resident faculty at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and has served as a visiting artist at Cooper Union, SVA, NYU, RISD, the MIT Media Lab, UCLA, and elsewhere.

Che Gossett is a trans femme writer, an archivist at the Barnard Center for Research on Women and a PhD candidate in trans/gender studies at Rutgers. They are the recipient of the 2014 Gloria E. Ánzaldúa Award from the American Studies Association, a Radcliffe research grant from Harvard University, the 2014 Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from the Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies at the City University of New York, and the 2014 Martin Duberman Research Scholar Award from the New York Public Library. They are working on a book project titled Blackness, the Beast and the Non Sovereign and have been selected as a 2017 Palestine American Research Center Fellow for their project titled "Non-Sovereignties: Personhood and Interspecies Politics of Palestinian Struggle."

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 theArts and The National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures.

Nelson Santos is an artist, curator, designer, and the former Executive Director of Visual AIDS, a non-profit arts organization that utilizes art to fight AIDS and supports artists living with HIV/AIDS. While at Visual AIDS (2000-2017) he curated Video Positive, The Bronx Museum, NY; Go Figure, LGBT Center, NY; Robert Blanchon + Stephen Andrews, Miami Dade Art Gallery, FL; Between Ten, Spin Gallery, Toronto, and co-curated Sight of Constructions with Michael Gonzalez. Over the years, he has worked with hundreds of curators to help research, produce and organize museum, gallery and online exhibitions featuring Visual AIDS artist members.

Elisabeth Subrin is an award-winning writer, director and video artist. Her critically acclaimed first feature, A Woman, A Part was released theatrically in 2017. She has received grants and fellowships for her screenplays and films from The Rockefeller Foundation, The Guggenheim Foundation, The Annenberg Foundation, Creative Capital, The Westenberger Foundation, and The Andrea Frank Foundation. Subrin is also an internationally acclaimed video and installation artist whose work has been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Biennial, The Institute of ContemporaryArt in London, The Guggenheim Museum, The Venice Viennale, and Harvard Film Archives, among others.

Frédéric Tcheng is a French-born filmmaker who co-produced and co-edited Valentino: The Last Emperor, the 2009 hit documentary shortlisted for an Oscar. In 2011 Frédéric co-directed Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel, a Samuel Goldwyn release. Dior and I, his award-winning directorial debut, was distributed worldwide in 2015. Frédéric's work has been selected in Venice, Toronto, and Telluride among other international film festivals. He is currently directing three new documentaries and developing fiction projects.

David Thomson, a native New Yorker, has primarily worked as a collaborative performer/creator in the fields of music, dance, theater, and performance with such artists as Bebe Miller, Trisha Brown ('87-'93), Susan Rethorst, Alain Buffard, Marina Abramovíc, Ralph Lemon, Yvonne Rainer, and Maria Hassabi among many others. His work has been presented and supported by The Kitchen, Danspace Project at St Mark's Church, Dance Theater Workshop, Movement Research at Judson Church, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Gibney Dance Center, LMCC, PSNY, and The Invisible Dog. Thomson is a Bessie Award-winning artist for Sustained Achievement (2001), a 2012 US Artist Ford Fellow, a NYFA Fellow in Choreography, and a Yaddo, MacDowell and Rauschenberg Fellow. He holds a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from SUNY Purchase.

About Queer|Art

Queer|Art launched in 2009 to support a generation of LGBTQ artists that lost mentors to the AIDS Crisis of the 1980s. By fostering the confident expression of LGBTQ artists' perspectives, stories, and identities, Queer|Art gives voice to a population that has been historically suppressed, disenfranchised, and often overlooked by traditional institutional and economic support systems. The current programs of Queer|Art include the year-long Queer|Art|Mentorship program, and the long-running Queer|Art|Film series, held monthly at the IFC Center in lower Manhattan.

The Queer|Art|Mentorship program, launched in 2010, produces an evolving intergenerational dialogue within the LGBTQ arts community that has a direct impact on the landscape of contemporary art and culture as a whole. The program, which pairs emerging and established artists in a year-long exchange, has propelled the careers of a new generation of creators. Queer|Art|Film, now in its eighth year, provides a space for invited artists to honor those who came before them and whose work continues to inspire them, further charting a uniquely queer cultural lineage through cinema to other artistic disciplines.

A list of the intergenerational community of artists supported and brought together by Queer|Art includes: Silas Howard, Jennie Livingston, Matt Wolf, Hilton Als, Sarah Schulman, Pamela Sneed, Justin Vivian Bond, Jibz Cameron, Trajal Harrell, John Kelly, Caden Manson, Everett Quinton, Geo Wyeth, Angela Dufresne, Nicole Eisenman, Avram Finkelstein, Chitra Ganesh, Pati Hertling, Jonathan Katz, Reina Gossett, Sasha Wortzel, Jess Barbagallo, Morgan Bassichis, Monstah Black, Yve Laris Cohen, iele paloumpis, Rebecca Patek, Justin Sayre, Colin Self, Justine Williams, Michael De Angelis, Jacolby Satterwhite, Rick Herron, and Hugh Ryan, among many others.