GIA YARN (Providence, RI)
FELLOW | LITERATURE

Gia Yarn is a Providence, RI based theatre director and the Casting Director & Artistic Producer at Trinity Repertory Company. Her work highlights the humor and heart of the human experience through comedic storytelling. She has directed productions with Rhode Island College, Reverie Theatre Group, Burbage Theatre Company, Barker Playhouse, and self-produced her debut with local RI theatre-makers. Gia has also directed staged readings and short plays with Brown University’s Rites & Reasons Theatre, the Boston Theater Marathon, and Trinity Rep’s teen playwriting competition. She has served as an associate/assistant director at Trinity Rep, Rhode Island Latino Arts/Trinity Rep, The Wilbury Theatre Group, Burbage, and Rites & Reasons Theatre. Gia holds a B.A. in Art and Entertainment Management from Dean College.

KATE BORNSTEIN (Middletown, RI)
MENTOR | LITERATURE

Kate Bornstein, an author, playwright, and performer, has reshaped gender and identity conversations for over thirty years. Their books, including Gender Outlaw, My Gender Workbook, and Hello, Cruel World, offer a compassionate rethinking of living outside the binary. A longtime performer, they’ve toured internationally, debuted on Broadway at 70, and appeared in The Blacklist and I Am Cait. Their memoir, A Queer and Pleasant Danger, recounts their journey from Scientology to gender outlaw. A new edition of Hello, Cruel World arrived April 29, 2025, and new edition of Nearly Roadkill: queer love on the run is due out in September 2025. Learn more at her website.

OSCAR K. (Flushing, NY)
FELLOW | PERFORMANCE

Oscar K. is an internationally produced playwright, performance poet, and filmmaker from Los Angeles, based in NYC and LA. He was awarded the 2022 Phyllis Anderson Prize by the American Repertory Theater. He was a semi-finalist for the 2023 Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference and a semi-finalist for the 2025 Terrence McNally New Works Incubator. Oscar’s work has been produced in London, New York City, Boston, and Los Angeles, including at The Divine, The Brick, Boston Center for the Arts, and Skylight Theatre. He has been commissioned by Celebration Theatre for a world premiere in December 2025. He has been commissioned to perform original poetry for the Los Angeles LGBT Center, the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture, The Huntington, and others. His work has been published in The Brooklyn Rail. He is a three-time Lambda Literary Fellow in Playwriting and Screenwriting and a Theater Offensive Queer (Re)Public Residency Artist. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America. Oscar holds a BA in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Theater, Dance & Media from Harvard College. @velveteen_fxggot. Learn more here.

CARMELITA TROPICANA (New York, NY)
MENTOR | PERFORMANCE

Carmelita Tropicana (aka Alina Troyano) is a writer and performer who straddles the worlds of performance art and theater and uses irreverent humor and fantasy as subversive tools to challenge cultural stereotypes and rewrite history from multiple perspectives. By performing hyperbolic feminine and masculine personas, as well as numerous animals, insects, and fantasy creatures, she challenges historical and narrative authority. She began devising work with her long-time collaborators Ela Troyano and Uzi Parnes creating multimedia spectacles and reviews. Her most recent work Give me Carmelita Tropicana! was a critically acclaimed theater collaboration with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins produced by Soho Rep in 2024. Tropicana has been the sole author of of works including a podcast memoir commissioned by Soho Rep titled That’s Not What Happened, Milk of Amnesia, a much published solo included in the Handbook of LatinX Art and The Drama Review, the futuristic play Chicas 2000, and With What Ass Does a Cockroach Sit? published in Animal Acts: Performing Species Today. Tropicana’s work has been written about in the academy beginning with queer theorist Jose Esteban Munoz in his seminal book Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics with an essay highlighting the collaboration of Ela Troyano and Carmelita Tropicana titled Sisters Act. In addition, Tropicana’s work also appears in art publications: Arte No Es Vida, Actions by Artists of the Americas 1960-2000 and Radical Conventions–Cuban American Art from the 1980’s. Select venues where her work has been produced/presented include: Soho Rep Theater (New York) Institute of Contemporary Art (London), the Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin), INTAR Theater (New York) and PS 122 (New York). Select awards/fellowships include: US Latin X Fellowship, United States Artists Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Creative Capital Grant, MacDowell Residency, Park Avenue Armory Residency, Anonymous Was a Woman, and an Obie award. Her book I, Carmelita Tropicana, Performing Between Cultures is a compilation of scripts, performances, short stories and was published by Beacon Press. She was coeditor with Jill Dolan and Holly Hughes of Memories of the Revolution: The First Ten Years of the Wow Café Theater. She serves on the Board of Directors of the New York Foundation for the Arts and Soho Rep Theater and is a member of Actors Equity and the Dramatist Guild. Learn more at her website.

DIEGO TORRES-CASSO (Monterey Park, CA)
FELLOW | VISUAL ART

Diego Torres-Casso (b. 1997, West Covina, CA) is a queer interdisciplinary artist and educator. Their practice combines photography, video, performance, and mixed media to explore Chicanx identity, history, and resilience within communities facing social and political challenges. Grounded in socially engaged frameworks, Diego centers erased stories to reveal tenderness and resistance amid oppression. Their work has been exhibited internationally and across the U.S., including the Boyhood series in Horažďovice, Czech Republic, and their self-portrait project Surveillance From Within at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. Diego dedicates themselves to nurturing emerging artists of color and currently leads photography education at Las Fotos Project. They are committed to bringing arts education to Boyle Heights, a historically underfunded immigrant community in Los Angeles.

PAUL MPAGI SEPUYA (Los Angeles, CA)
MENTOR | VISUAL ART

Paul Mpagi Sepuya (b. 1982, San Bernardino, CA) is a Los Angeles-based artist working in photography. He received an MFA in photography at UCLA in 2016 and a BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2004. He went on to participate in Artist-in-Residence programs with LMCC, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, The Studio Museum in Harlem and FIAR, and was a recipient of the 2019 Rauschenberg Residency. Sepuya’s work is in the permanent collections museums like the Getty and LACMA, SFMOMA, MoMA, the Whitney and thee Guggenheim, the Studio Museum, Stedelijk Museum, Tate Modern and Victoria & Albert Museum, and among others. Solo museum exhibitions include Fotomuseum Amsterdam, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Deichtorhallen PHOXXI in Hamburg, and museum surveys at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis at the Nottingham Contemporary. Sepuya’s recent hybrid monograph-artist book “Dark Room A - Z” was published by Aperture in the Fall of 2024. His work has been covered and published in ARTFORUM, Aperture, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Art Review, Frieze, Art in America, Monocle, Osmos, The Nation, and The Guardian among others. He is Associate Professor in Visual Arts at the University of California San Diego and has taught at CalArts and Bard MFA. Learn more at his website.

HAO ZHOU (Gambier, OH)
FELLOW | FILM

Hao Zhou is a filmmaker originally from southwest China. Zhou’s queer and feminist-themed films span narrative, documentary, and experimental modes. In 2014, Zhou released "The Night" (2014), a no-budget feature exploring the lives of queer sex workers in Chongqing. Zhou’s short films include “Correct Me If I’m Wrong” (2025), “Like What Would Sorrow Look” (2024), “Wouldn’t Make It Any Other Way” (2024), and others. Their films have been screened at the Berlinale, Locarno, Rotterdam, SXSW, Golden Horse, and other venues. A 2024 Vimeo ‘Breakout Creator of the Year,’ Zhou is currently developing their first feature documentary, “All Fixed Up.”

ELA TROYANO (New York, NY)
MENTOR | FILM

Ela Troyano is a filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist, born in Cuba and based in New York City. Select films include include Carmelita Tropicana Your Kunst Is Your Waffen / Your Art Is Your Weapon (1994); Latin Boys Go To Hell (1997); La Lupe Queen of Latin Soul (2007); the expanded cinema performance The Silence of Marcel Duchamp with Uzi Parnes, with music by John Zorn (2010), the podcast That’s Not What Happened (2021) by her long time collaborator and sister Carmelita Tropicana. Select awards include funding from Creative Capital, the Ford Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Latino Public Broadcasting, New York State Council on the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, the Independent Television Service (PBS), and United States Artist Fellowship. She was selected to attend the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program and script writing programs at INTAR with Maria Irene Fornes and at the Sundance Institute with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Her films are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Arsenal Institut fur Film und Videokunst e.V., Berlin. Troyano developed Creative Capital’s signature Spanish language professional development program Taller, was the founding Director of the Leslie-Lohman Museum’s Artist Fellowship from 2027 to 2024, and she’s a founding member of Strategic Planning Partners. Learn more at her website.

JOSALYNN SMITH (Los Angeles, CA)
FELLOW | FILM

Josalynn Smith is a filmmaker originally from St. Louis, Missouri. Their feature directorial debut, “Ride or Die,” was produced by Jamie Foxx and premiered in competition at Tribeca 2025. Josalynn’s work has been supported by Sundance, SFFILM, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. They’ve been in residence at the Catwalk Institute and participated in the BendFilm Basecamp Fellowship and the Athena Lab. Josalynn completed their MFA in Film at Columbia University.

DESIREE AKHAVAN (London, UK)
MENTOR | FILM

Desiree Akhavan is a filmmaker and writer whose work includes Appropriate Behavior, the Hulu original series The Bisexual and The Miseducation of Cameron Post, which won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize. As a television director, Akhavan’s worked on a breadth of shows including the Emmy ward winning HACKS and RAMY. Her first book, YOU'RE EMBARRASSING YOURSELF, was published by Random House in 2024.

JOSHUA ESCOBAR (Fontana, CA)
FELLOW | LITERATURE

Joshua Escobar is author of the chapbooks Califorkya Voltage (No, Dear/Small Anchor) and xxox fm (Doublecross Press), and a full-length collection of poems, Bareback Nightfall (Noemi Press, Letras Latinas) that was a finalist for the 2021 California Book Award. They won the Bo Huston Prize 2023 for their debut novel Demons of Eminence (Fellow Travelers Series, Publication Studio Hudson). An Assistant Professor at Santa Barbara City College, they have directed programs related to Title V, Creative Writing, and equity in teaching. They edit the student magazine Open Fruit. They have received fellowships from CantoMundo and Shandaken: Storm King. They recently studied Spanish at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and Instituto Cultural Oaxaca. Born and raised in southern California’s Inland Empire, they currently live in Los Angeles.

TOMMY PICO (Los Angeles, CA)
MENTOR | LITERATURE

Tommy Pico is a poet and screen writer. Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, He now lives in Los Angeles after a 15 year stint in NYC. He is author of the books IRL (Birds, LLC, 2016), winner of the 2017 Brooklyn Library Literary Prize and a finalist for the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, Nature Poem (Tin House Books, 2017), winner of a 2018 American Book Award and finalist for the 2018 Lambda Literary Award, Junk (Tin House Books, 2018) finalist for the 2019 Lambda Literary Award, Feed (Tin House Books, 2019) a New York Times Notable book of 2020 and finalist for the 2021 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and the zine series Hey, Teebs. He was the founder and editor in chief of birdsong, an antiracist/queer-positive collective, small press, and zine that published art and writing from 2008-2013. He was a Queer|Art|Mentorship inaugural Fellow, 2013 Lambda Literary fellow in poetry, a 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts, was awarded the 2017 Friends of Literature prize from the Poetry Foundation, won a 2018 Whiting Award, is a 2021 Artist-in-Residence for Sundance’s Native Lab, and he’s been profiled in Time Out New York, the New York Times, and the New Yorker. He co-curates the reading series Poets With Attitude (PWA) with Morgan Parker at the Ace Hotel, co-hosted the podcasts Food 4 Thot and Scream, Queen!, is the former poetry editor at Catapult Magazine, writes for the TV shows Reservation Dogs, Resident Alien, and Crystal Lake, and is a contributing editor at Literary Hub. Learn more at his website.

ELSE WENT (Brooklyn, NY)
FELLOW | PERFORMANCE

Else Went (she/herself) is a playwright from Coastal Podunk, CA, now based in Brooklyn. She has been described as a chameleon artist, writing plays which draw on myriad formal and aesthetic conventions to create intrinsically queer and quietly radical narratives which have been supported and developed by The Public Theater, Ars Nova, Playwright's Realm, South Coast Rep, Playwrights Horizons, WP, Breaking the Binary, and more. She develops these plays with her wife and artistic partner, director Emma Rosa Went, with whom she will be premiering Initiative, a five-hour epic about adolescence at the turn of the millennium, this fall as the Tow Foundation Playwright in Residence at The Public.

BRANDEN JACOBS-JENKINS (Brooklyn, NY)
MENTOR | PERFORMANCE

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is a Brooklyn-based playwright. Recent theatre credits include Purpose (Pulitzer Prize; Broadway, Steppenwolf), Appropriate (Tony Award; Broadway, Second Stage), The Comeuppance (Signature Theatre), Girls (Yale Rep), Everybody (Signature Theatre), War (Yale Rep; Lincoln Center/LCT3), Gloria (Vineyard Theatre), Appropriate (Obie Award; Signature Theatre), An Octoroon (Obie Award; Soho Rep, Theatre for a New Audience), and Neighbors (The Public Theater). He currently teaches at Yale University and serves as Vice President of the Dramatists Guild council and on the boards of Soho Rep, Park Avenue Armory, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and the Dramatists Guild Foundation. Honors include a USA Artists fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, the MacArthur fellowship, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Drama, and the inaugural Tennessee Williams Award.

Ash Cook [Hoyle] (New York, NY)
FELLOW | FILM

ASH COOK [HOYLE] is a burgeoning creative contributor and an experienced film curator. A features Programmer at the Sundance Film Festival, Ash also serves as the Guest Festival Director of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival and on the Advisory Board of the Los Angeles Festival of Movies. Ash is a 2021 Project Involve Fellow and has also been involved in programming Damn These Heels, Palm Spring Shortsfest, NewFest, Sun Valley Film Festival, Overlook Film Festival, and AFI Fest and worked in production at ABC, Mssng Peces, and The Annoyance Theater. Ash is originally from Philadelphia, PA and holds a dual degree in Film and English from Vassar College.

SAM FEDER (Brooklyn, NY)
MENTOR | FILM

Sam Feder is a Peabody Award-nominated film director and writer. Sam created and directed Heightened Scrutiny (Sundance 2025), DISCLOSURE (Sundance 2020, Netflix 2020), the widely acclaimed Kate Bornstein is a Queer and Pleasant Danger, and Boy I Am. Sam’s films explore the intersection of media and politics along the lines of race, class, and gender. Sam’s films have been programmed by Sundance Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, CPH:DOX, MOMA PS-1, The British Film Institute, The Hammer Museum, and in hundreds of film festivals around the world. Sam’s work has been supported by Ford/JustFilms, Fork Films, California Humanities, The Jerome Foundation, Perspective Fund, Threshold, IFP Film Week, Good Pitch USA/Doc Society, MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo artist residency. Learn more at their website.

ANDREW SUGGS (Red Hook, NY)
FELLOW | LITERATURE

Andrew Suggs (they/them) is an arts worker whose research, writing, and curatorial practice centers on art and AIDS. They grew up in Appalachian Tennessee and have held positions at several nonprofit arts organizations including Executive Director of Vox Populi (Philadelphia). They have studied at the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS) at Bard College and in the department of Art, Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University.

HUGH RYAN (Brooklyn, NY)
MENTOR | LITERATURE

Hugh Ryan is the award-winning author of When Brooklyn Was Queer (2019) and The Women’s House of Detention (2022), and a forthcoming memoir in essays. He teaches creative nonfiction in the MFA program at the Bennington Writing Seminars, and runs the Queer History 101 Book Club with Peppermint for Allstora.com. He received the 2016 Martin Duberman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, several New York Foundation for the Arts grants in Nonfiction Literature, the 2019-2020 Allan Berube Prize for outstanding work in public LGBT History from the Committee on LGBT History at the American Historical Association, and the 2019 New York City Book Award. He has been awarded residencies at both Yaddo and Watermill, and was a a 2016 QAM Fellow. Learn more at his website.

Danyela Brown (Washington, D.C.)
FELLOW | PERFORMANCE

Danyela June Brown is a set-maker and witness from South Arlington, VA engaging autonomy, access, and Black/trans use-value. She has presented work at Touchstone Gallery, Sound Scene, Dance Institute of Washington, and Performance Space New York. She has danced for Aleta Hayes, Rashad Pridgen, Olaiya Olayemi, Culture Shock DC, the Houses of Mizrahi (2017-2019), and Kiki Houses of Old Navy (2018-2020) and Supreme (2023-Present). Danyela was the inaugural Artistic Director of DMV Kiki Nights (2023-2025) and the Performance Curator for Queer Art Salon (2024, 2025). She has completed EMERGENYC (2020), the Education Fellowship at Dia Art Foundation (2019-2021), and the Peer Case Management Institute at Howard University School of Social Work (2024). She holds a BA in African American Studies from Stanford University and is an MFA Candidate in Sculpture at Bard College. Danyela works for the District Department of Human Services in PSH Intake.

JULIE TOLENTINO (Los Angeles, CA)
MENTOR | PERFORMANCE

Julie Tolentino is a Filipino-Salvadoran queer interdisciplinary performance installation maker whose work draws from visual, archival, collaborative, and movement strategies. Her work has been presented in solo and group shows including (selected) The Kitchen, Danspace Project, Participant, Inc., Performance Space New York, Performa 2005 and 2013, the New Museum, LACE, The Lab, PSi at Stanford University, the Nevada Art Museum, Aspen Art Museum, and as a collaborator in the 2022 Whitney Biennial. She/They have exhibited internationally in the UK, France, Germany, Philippines, Singapore, Abu Dhabi, and in Northern Macedonia at the Museum of Contemporary Art and in the Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art. They have served as a visiting/guest artist at UCLA WAC, UCLA New Genres, UCR-New Genres, Cal Arts-Performance, Rutgers-Art, Pratt-Art, BARD Curatorial Studies amongst others. She was a 2021-22 scholar-in-residence at NYU Steinhardt, a 2021 MacDowell and UCROSS fellow, a 2022-23 Queer Art Mentor with Anh Vo, and has been a TDR Provocations editor since 2012. Support includes Mid-Atlantic Foundation - Arts International, Anonymous Was A Woman, the Queer Art Sustained Achievement, Art Matters, and Foundation for Contemporary Art Awards. Tolentino is sponsored by Fractured Atlas, performs with Stosh Fila, and is represented by Commonwealth and Council. They are a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2025-26 MacDowell Fellow, and an inaugural recipient of the 2025 FCA Creative Research Grant. You can learn more at her website.

ODALYS BURGOA (The Bronx, NY)
FELLOW | VISUAL ART

Odalys or O (All Pronouns) is a Mexican multidisciplinary artist with a focus in painting and photography. They create art that reflects the stories told in The Bronx, and the history that led us to the conditions we live in today. Their memories make appearances in their paintings and they use words to give clear context on the political nuances in the paintings. Their photography dances on the intergenerational connections of their family, their stories and their family archives. Their art has been exhibited through Chashama and NYBG. They are a BRIO (Bronx Recognizes its Own) award recipient for 2021 and  a New York City Artist Grant Recipient. They were a Bronx Council on the Arts artist in residency for 2024 on Governors island.

SHELLYNE RODRIGUEZ (The Bronx, NY)
MENTOR | VISUAL ART

Shellyne Rodriguez is an artist, educator, writer, and community organizer based in the Bronx. Her practice utilizes text, drawing, painting, collage and sculpture to depict spaces and subjects engaged in strategies of survival against erasure and subjugation.

MAE HOWARD (Brooklyn, NY)
FELLOW | VISUAL ART

Mae Howard’s interdisciplinary approach extends across research-based, participatory, and collaborative projects. Calling upon lineages of disabled labor economies, Mae is interested in the embodied, fleshly, and material enmeshment of BDSM, the medical industrial complex, leather histories, biopolitics, and debilitation. Howard received an MFA and Certificate in Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies from The University of Pennsylvania. They are an alumna of the Whitney Independent Study Program and have recently completed residencies at BricLab (Brooklyn, NY), ACRE (Steuben, WI), Picture Berlin (Berlin, DE), Activation Residency (Woodridge, NY), Pocoapoco (Oaxaca, MX), BAX Arts (Brooklyn, NY).

CASSILS (Brooklyn, NY)
MENTOR | VISUAL ART

Cassils (b. 1975, Canada) is a Guggenheim award winning visual and performance artist who makes their transgender body the material and protagonist of their performances. Cassils' art contemplates the history(s) of LGBTQI+ violence, representation, struggle, survival and empowerment. For Cassils, performance is a form of social sculpture: Drawing from the idea that bodies are formed in relation to forces of power and social expectations, Cassils’ work investigates historical contexts to examine the present moment. Cassils currently has a solo exhibition at SITE Santa Fe, NM and is developing a new performance piece as an artist in residency at Park Avenue Armory. They have recent exhibitions and performances at the Banff Center for Art and Creativity, HOME Manchester, National Theater, Southbank Center, Victoria Albert Museum, Barbican; UK, Perth, Institute for Contemporary Arts; AU, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, NYC and MU Eindhoven, Netherlands. They are the recipient of the National Creation Fund, a Fleck Residency from the Banff Center for the Arts, a Princeton Lewis Artist Fellowship finalist, a Villa Bellagio Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, a United States Artist Fellowship and a Creative Capital Award. Cassils is an Associate Professor in Sculpture and Integrated Practices at PRATT Institute. Learn more at their website.