QUEER ART IMPACT

Sunday’s panel discussion, will explore the conversation between politics and art. Moderated by award-winning arts writer, editor & educator Brian McCormick, a cross-section of artists/activists will unravel the significance of LGBTQ performance in affecting social change. Panelists include: featured Gay Wars artist Charlie Demos; strategist, producer, and social entrepreneur, Shalonda Ingram;  solo performing artist Shelly Mars; “Go-Go boy of the Damned” Max Steele; and interdisciplinary-artist and activist Yozmit.

PANEL MODERATOR

BRIAN MCCORMICK is an award-winning arts writer, editor, & educator, and the de facto Executive Director of Nicholas Leichter Dance, a professional touring company currently funded by NYSCA, the NEA, and the National Dance Project of the New England Foundation for the Arts. He has written for The New York Times, The Advocate, Dance Magazine, Dance Studio Life, Classical TV.com, Movement Research Journal, and Encore Publications, and is the long-time contributing dance editor for Gay City News, where as Arts Editor from 2005-2007, he earned the newspaper a New York Press Association award for arts coverage. He also received a Mayoral Citation and was nominated for a Presidential Volunteer Action award for his work with The Streetwork Project of Victims Services Agency. McCormick has been Part-time Faculty for The New School Media Studies MA program since 1997, teaching digital performance theory as well as courses in media concepts and digital photography & design. Since 2003, he has developed and taught Dance TRaC—the Teen Reviewers and Critics program of High 5 Tickets to the Arts. In 2009, he joined the New York City Arts-in-Education community as a career mentor for dance seniors at Frank Sinatra School of the Arts. Brian has been a panelist, moderator, guest curator, and/or adjudicator for New York Foundation for the Arts, Joyce Theater Foundation, Dance Theater Workshop, Brooklyn Arts Council, Hunter College Dance Department, Kinetic Cinema, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Young Dance Makers, Movement Research, and others; he has done marketing, & audience engagement work for the American Dance Festival, Joyce SoHo, DTW, Danspace Project, Long Island Arts Council, and Scholastic Arts; reporting work for DTW and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; and media coordination for Dancing in the Streets' Hip-Hop Generation Next Festival with City Parks Foundation and Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors. He is a member of the New York Dance and Performance Awards (Bessies) committee. [bmacmedia.net]

PANELIST

With a purely astounding vocal range, CHARLIE DEMOS is able to fuse his natural affinity of soul and R&B with punchy electro-pop, creating a musical style that is clearly his own. Since March 2006, the prolific musician has already released three chart-topping albums, including his eponymous debut album; 2008’s How to be a Boi and his current album, Anatomy 1, the first half of the Anatomy Project. The music video to the first single from Anatomy 1, “Insane,” shot to the top of the charts shortly after its world premiere, and was named to the LOGO Network’s “Ultimate Queer Videos of All Time” list, as well as being nominated for “Video of the Year.” Charlie is currently in the studio working on the follow-up album, Anatomy 2, for release this year.

SHALONDA INGRAM, founder of Nursha Project™ is a strategist, producer, and social entrepreneur committed to transforming the planet via pro-activism and to sociopolitical change via community empowerment and civic, youth, and arts engagement. She also founded Born Brown: All Rights Reserved®, a social enterprise agency that promotes understanding and collaboration among people of color with various origins by countering oppressive media with messaging that evokes self-acceptance and self-love and United States of Consciousness™, a consortium of responsible business to business consumers united by their interest to leverage purchasing power. In 2005, Shalonda partook in the manifestation of the Bay Area Black United Fund document, “Microloan and Worker Cooperative: A Strategy for Youth Enterprise Development,” which explored microfinance lending for youth entrepreneurs. Shalonda has participated in several college and university panel discussions including Hip Hop and Religion organized by the Department of Performance Studies at New YorkUniversity and sponsored by Peace Out East, Laney College’s panel on Women of Color and Ethnic Studies, and Providence College’s panel on Human Behavior in Social Systems. Recently, she moderated the Young Women’s Health and Leadership Summit at the University of California, San Francisco and contributed to a discussion on “Strategizing Social Marketing” in community-based health research at the Black and Latino Student Caucus Third Annual Minority Health Advocacy Conference at the Joseph Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. In addition to serving as the Producer at Dance Theater Workshop, Shalonda sits on various arts funding councils including the City of Oakland’s Funding Advisory Board and the Brooklyn Arts Council Community Arts Regrant Program. In 2009, she was nominated for The Corporation for National & Community Service Eli Segal Award and the New York Innovative Theater Award for the Nursha Project production, Where My Girls At?. Shalonda is continually exploring ways through which she can fulfill her commitment to creative exchange and sustainability in light of infinite possibility.

SHELLY MARS is an established solo performance artist based in Manhattan who has entertained and shocked audiences in the US and around the world for 20 years.

1. “For me, there is Sappho, Gertrude Stein, & Shelly Mars.”
   

2. — Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham
   

Mars’ solo shows include The Homo Bonobo Project (2010)  Sex on Mars (2006) ,Bug Chasers (2005), Whiplash: Tales of a Tomboy (1999), and Invasion from Mars (1997). Venues have included Abrons Theater (Performa 2009), PS 122, New York Theatre Workshop, The Kitchen, Dixon Place, and Highways Performance Space. Sex on Mars enjoyed a five-month run in Provincetown, MA in 2000. Her monologues have also been published in the book Creating Your Own Monologue.

As one of the first “drag kings” of the late 1980s, Mars appeared all over TV (Kids in the Hall, Phil Donahue, Montel Williams, Sally Jessy Raphael) and in many films, including Drop Dead Rock with Debbie Harry and Adam Ant, Jennie Livingston’s Who’s the Top?, the HBO special Drag Kings, and the independent documentary Venus Boyz.

Recently, Mars has been Artist in Residence at NYC’s Museum of Sex and has received grants from the New York State Council on the Arts (2010), the Arcus Foundation, the Gill Foundation, and the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art, and she is currently hosting a performance series at Dixon Place theatre, called, "Bulldyke Chronicles" that she co-hosts with Kirby the Bulldog.

MAX STEELE is a performer and writer. He has presented work at the New Museum, Rapture Café, Deitch Projects, Envoy Gallery, and Dixon Place's 2008 HOT! Festival. He writes the experimental porno zine Scorcher, is a contributor to East Village Boys, and has had his writing featured in HX Magazine, Fag School, Birdsong, and at New York's PPOW Gallery. He was included in Interview magazine’s 2009 "art issue,” and his nightclub performances have earned him the title “Go-Go boy of the Damned.”

YOZMIT is a singer/ interdisciplinary performance artist/ costume designer incorporating sound/movement/visual element of human body to research and express the unknown mysteries of her universe.

He started his professional career as a fashion designer but rediscovered himself as a performing artist through the practice of traditional Korean music(Pansori, Gayageum Byungchang), Corporeal Mime and modern dance.

She studied and performed with Thomas Leabhart's Corporeal mime group 'MICE', Rachel Rosenthal Company, Laurie Cameron Company, Seo Hoonjung Pansori group, Takuya Muramatsu from Dairakudakan, Hou Ying from Shen Wei Dance Arts. He is also a scholarship recipient of American Dance Festival(ADF).

Currently, She is based in Brooklyn, NY, working on her solo album and Abstract Cabaret Perfomance Series(performance art meets electro drag cabaret with shamanism). His work is shown at The Box and other venues in NYC.

He is performing in Marina Abramovic's 'artist is present' at MoMA which opened on March 14th,  2010.

In addition to her work as an artist, she was also involved with HIV/AIDS prevention work, transgender civil rights work.