To our greater Queer|Art community,
As you know from our earlier blog post, Kris Grey, our first-ever QAM Program Facilitator, has recently accepted a full-time position as visiting artist at Penn State. We've learned so much from our collaboration with Kris this past year and have made such huge strides with QAM thanks to their thoughtful engagement with our Fellows, Mentors, and staff. Kris's involvement and care leaves the Mentorship program well-poised for a new facilitator to hit the ground running and help take our work together to new heights.
Queer|Art is excited to announce that we've hired a new QAM Program Facilitator—please join me in welcoming Matice Moore to the team!
Originally from Arizona, Matice brings 20 years of experience in youth program development, gender justice, and the arts to their work with us. As a consultant and facilitator with Brown Boi Project, Matice provides oversight and support to the Brown Boi project staff for field projects designed to support gender justice education and inclusive programming for youth and adults in California and North Carolina. They also develop and lead trainings for community-oriented service providers to address issues related to mass incarceration, racial justice and gender equity. Matice has worked as a consultant for Essie Justice Group, as a program manager at Community Works West, and for eight years served as Program Director of African American Student Affairs at University of Arizona.
Matice is also a working artist! As a printmaker and painter, they explore themes of Blackness, grief, spirituality, and social change. While Matice studied figure drawing in 2002 as a minor during their undergraduate degree program, they did not self-identify as an “artist” until 2014 when they discovered that printmaking was a reliable way to fundraise for and otherwise connect with the Black Lives Matter movement. Since then, they have worked on a number of social campaigns, including the Trans Life and Liberation project, Trans Day of Resilience, and CultureStrike’s Visions from the Inside project. More recently, Matice has been working with artists and artist residency programs to create spaces that recruit and support black artists, along with other identities otherwise underrepresented among typical residency participants.
We are confident that Matice will shine as our new facilitator to the Mentorship program. We look forward to working with them to continue deepening our engagement with the Mentorship community—both with our current Fellows and Mentors as well as with our alumni. In our conversations with Matice, we immediately recognized a shared network of values aligning closely with our mission to provide artists with the tools, resources, and relationships they need to sustain their work and thrive, as they may wish, at the highest levels of their fields. We can't wait to get started on the work ahead.