The story of our borough is incomplete without the contributions of our queer and trans residents. From Walt Whitman to Tourmaline, the LGBTQ community's desires, creative expression, and fight have enlivened our collective consciousness, expanded our human rights, and instilled in us an impulse to fight for a more equitable — and joyful —tomorrow.
Through our Arts+ Innovation Incubator and Grants programs, Brooklyn Arts Council has been honored to support a number of local LGBTQ artists each year. Below, you'll find just some of these stories of artistry, resilience, and triumph. In the spirit of Pride Month and the upcoming 51st anniversary of the Stonewall Uprisings, we encourage you to join us in following and celebrating these artists' powerful work.
Scroll down to see a list of funding opportunities for LGBTQ+ artists
Imara Jones | TransLash
Imara Jones
Imara Jones — whose contributions to media and social justice have won Emmy and Peabody Awards — is a journalist, intersectional-news producer, and creator of TransLash. Imara is currently a Soros Equality Fellow.
TransLash tells trans stories to save trans lives during this pivotal moment in history. Beginning in 2018 as a series of video shorts which focus on what it is like to be trans —especially a trans person of color at a time of social backlash, it has evolved into a cross-platform media effort led by founder and creator Imara Jones. Through the lens of journalism and personal narrative, TransLash creates and curates content, events, and resources in collaboration with their partners, as well as in community with trans individuals and allies. Through their work Translash centers the humanity of the most marginalized of the marginalized.
Anh Vo | BABYLIFT
Anh Vo; Photograph courtesy Erin X. Smithers, November 2017
Anh Vo creates dances about pornography and queer relations, about being and form, about identity and abstraction, about history and its colonial reality. Their content-driven approach produces an omnivorous attitude toward forms, as they draw from a range of aesthetics including Western experimental dance, Afro-diasporic dances (Vogue, House, West African), Vietnamese traditional rituals, Brechtian epic theater, and feminist and queer performance art. They orient their work toward the audience members, living and dead.
BABYLIFT is named after the operation responsible for the mass evacuation of Vietnamese orphans from South Vietnam to the US and other Western countries. The first plane to leave crashed into a rice paddy, killing 78 children whose deaths are largely unmourned and unremembered. Anh's project attempts to, first and foremost, provide an ongoing memorial for these forgotten lives. Working with iconic photojournalistic images, they draw from the rituals in Vietnamese culture to connect themself with the dead and conjure them into the performance space. Their goal is to queer the history of the Cold War, creating an abstract and affectively-charged narrative that weave together cultural memories of the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, the American freedom fantasy of the 1960s, and the current political upheaval.
ChamberQUEER 2020
ChamberQUEER; Photo courtesy Elizabeth van Os
ChamberQUEER, founded in 2018 by four queer musicians, is an LGBTQ+ chamber music organization with a mission to program queer artists and composers; highlight historically under-represented queer figures in classical music; and provide an inclusive and intersectional space in classical music for artists and audiences alike. ChamberQUEER events take two forms: concerts, and community events like group music-making and open mics. Each event takes place within an intentional, intersectional queer space — that is, one where all performers self-identify as queer, but where all are welcome. Its flagship event is a three-day concert series during Pride month.
Visit the ChamberQUEER website
Noah Schamus | Kind Of
Kind Of; Photo courtesy A. Mert Erdem, January 19, 2020
Noah Schamus is a Bushwick-based artist, born and raised in New York. Telling and consuming stories helped them traverse the world as a young person and to develop a set of politics based around empathy. Even as their films vary in tone, genre, and mood, they are deeply invested in the project of exploring what makes us human. They also strongly identify as a queer filmmaker and want to tell queer stories that complicate our collective understanding of what it means to be queer on screen.
Kind Of is a short narrative film that follows two trans-masculine folks in a newly open relationship as they prepare to host brunch for their friends. When Aidan returns home from a hookup-turned-sleepover, his partner, Micah, presses him to share more about his desires for other people. As they spar and lay out an enticing brunch spread for their guests, Micah’s insecurities concerning their non-monogamy spill out onto the breakfast table.
Noah co-wrote the film Kind Of with their own partner, Arno Mokros. As two trans, masculine-of-center writers in a relationship themselves, they wrote this script to put true-to-life trans lives on screen, presenting a playful comedy that explores how things can get complicated in queer love. They wanted to touch on topics like masculinity, non-monogamy, and desirability, all while maintaining a sense of humor. So while their ten-minute script presents a story of conflict between two protagonists as they confront insecurities in their relationship as the action unfolds in real-time, Aidan and Micah always maintain affection for one another, and the film maintains an endearing and light-hearted tone.
Maria Bauman-Morales | Desire: A Sankofa Dream
Desire: A Sankofa Dream
Muscles. Beads of sweat. Exertion. Inversion. Carving out selfhood. These images and ideas are linked for Maria Bauman-Morales. As a woman dancer, a person of color, a Southern not-quite-belle who grew up poor, and a queer person, clear ideas of physical labor, beauty, and body presentation are each held in her every movement. She uses multiple genres to embody agency, including visual art, singing, writing, and her artistic engine: dance. The popular notion of a “neutral body,” often described in contemporary dance classes, does not exist in her experience. Rather, she creates from storied bodies, mythological bodies, bodies-in-creation, and bodies-as-manifestos.
Desire: A Sankofa Dream is a multi-disciplinary, site-responsive artwork centered on imagination and consent as mechanisms of survival which must be practiced rigorously. The piece – which takes place inside a kaleidoscope – includes dancing, original text, art installation, and music. Desire is a sprawling fantasy, spilling out across several rooms and spaces throughout a building. Witness-participants (audience members) travel at leisure from space to space to experiment with how their imagination and desires shift the kaleidoscope. Consent and desire are themes of the work in both content and format; the witness-participants may choose to travel guided by a Mistress of Ritual, or on their own in small groups.
M the Myth | Him to Them
Michael Vang is a genderqueer pop artist who goes by M the Myth. They use music and performance as a vehicle to spread awareness about issues surrounding gender identity. M started expressing queerness at a very young age; identifying more as a woman than as a man, though gendered as a boy at birth. They faced tremendous adversity in their youth, and as a result, hid my gender identity from the public. It is M's goal to show their community the beauty of genderfluidity using their passion for music
M's project, Him to Them, is an intergalactic-space-opera based on the story of their gender transition. The show explores various expressions of gender. They have performed Him to Them in several venues in New York. The show is influenced by the traditions of glam rock and inspired by artists such as David Bowie, Boy George, and George Michael. Over the course of one hour, M dances to and sings thirteen original songs, changes into six original costumes, and performs six choreographed dances with two backup dancers while a film is projected onto the backdrop of the stage.
Grants and Opportunities for LGBTQ Artists
The Association of LGBTQ Journalists
The Jeanne Córdova Award recognizes the achievement of an LGBTQ woman for a current body of work in journalism and/or opinion, with an emphasis on but not exclusively coverage of issues of importance to the LGBTQ community, in any medium and on any platform. | $2,000
Barbara Hammer Experimental Lesbian Filmmaker Grant
This annual grant will be awarded to self-identified lesbians for making visionary moving-image art. The grant, which is named in honor of legendary filmmaker Barbara Hammer, is supported directly by funds provided by Hammer and administered through Queer|Art by lesbians for lesbians, with a rotating panel of judges. | $6,000
Eva Yaa Asantewaa Grant for Queer Women(+) Dance Artists
The Eva Yaa Asantewaa Grant for Queer Women(+) Dance Artists is a new grant awarded to US-based artists for making cutting-edge dance and movement-based performance work. Women(+): The Eva Yaa Asantewaa Grant employs an expansive definition of the word “woman." | $7,000
Funding Queerly
The Funding Queerly Giving Circle is a group of young donors who believe that small-budget LGBTQI groups lack the funding resources they need to organize, build power and leadership, and make positive sustainable change. Funding Queerly has partnered with the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice to make grants to small-budget LGBTQI groups throughout the United States who are led by and for people of color, indigenous, low-income, and rural communities. We intentionally and explicitly pledge this support because we believe that liberation for Black and undocumented immigrant communities is essential to the liberation of all people. | Varies
Lambda Literary
The Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging LGBTQ Writers (formerly the Dr. Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award) recognizes LGBTQ-identified writers whose work demonstrates their strong potential for promising careers. The award includes a cash prize. Two Emerging LGBTQ Writer prizes are awarded annually. | $1,000
Queer|Art Prize
Made possible through Queer|Art’s ongoing partnership with HBO, Queer|Art|Prize presents two awards to LGBTQ artists based in the United States: one for Sustained Achievement and the other for Recent Work. With a Nominating Committee of 20 esteemed arts professionals from around the country, Queer|Art|Prize confirms the impact of our programming and support on a national level. | $10,000
Robert Giard Grant for Emerging LGBTQ+ Photographers
Through a new partnership with The Robert Giard Foundation, Queer|Art’s international grant supports the creation of work by emerging LGBTQ+ photographers whose projects address issues of sexuality, gender, or LGBTQ+ identity. Previously known as The Robert Giard Fellowship (2008-2018), the newly relaunched grant is named in honor of photographer Robert Giard (1939-2002), a portrait, landscape, and figure photographer whose work focused on LGBTQ+ lives and issues. | $10,000
Stonewall Community Foundation
SCF is proud to offer grants that benefit LGBTQ individuals who have an express need for support. These microgrants with some flexibility depending on the request. Right now, microgrants are awarded to help lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer women as well as non-binary and gender nonconforming individuals who have lost family support because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Applicants must be between 16 and 26 years old and reside in the United States. | $25 to $650