Queer Rebels Fest

May 29 & 30, 2015
QUEER REBELS FEST!
African American Art and Culture Complex
762 Fulton Street
7pm Doors; 7:30pm Show
$12-$25 sliding scale, NOTA
Multidisciplinary

May 29th 7:30pm: Click here for Brown Paper Tickets
May 30th 7:30pm: Click here for Brown Paper Tickets

Introducing….QUEER REBELS FEST! Two nights of provocative performance by queer and trans artists of color! From the Third World Student strikes to LA Riots to Black Lives Matter movement, we examine spaces of separation and solidarity among communities of color. How do we build solidarity amidst the deadliness of anti-Black racism? How do we carve out space for all of our stories and complexities? Let us build fierce alliances, cracking open artistic freedom and raising up our collective voices!

Mission: Founded in late 2008 by artists KB Boyce and Celeste Chan, Queer Rebels showcases queer/trans artists of color, connects generations, and honors our histories with art for the future.

“A new and ripe realm for building power, community, and visibility” – Bitch Magazine

“This is the queer future. We’re not waiting for it, we’re building it.” – Autostraddle

MORE INFO: QUEERREBELS.COM and WWW.FACEBOOK.COM/QRPRODUCTIONS

Presented by Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center and Queer Cultural Center.

BIOGRAPHIES

Photo credit: Lydia Daniller	Queer Rebels Co-Directors: KB Boyce is a two-spirit musician whose adventures have brought hir from teenage punk band appearances at CBGB in NY, to B-grade horror movies in LA, and on to solo drag king blues performance as TuffNStuff in San Francisco. KB pays Afropunk homage to African-American and Indigenous legacies of resistance through art. MOON RAY RA is a collaboration and collage of experimental sound, text, and image. MOON RAY RA creates “space/time/travel” with KB Boyce and Celeste Chan.
Queer Rebels Co-Directors: Celeste Chan is an experimental artist, writer, and organizer. Schooled by DIY and immigrant parents from Malaysia and the Bronx NY, she is a Hedgebrook, Lambda Literary, and VONA alumni. Her writing can be found in: Ada: Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, As/us literary journal, Cream City Review’s genrequeer folio, Feminist Wire, Glitterwolf, Hyphen Magazine, Matador, and the anthology Writing the Walls Down: A Convergence of LGBTQ Voices (Trans-Genre Press). Her films have screened in CAAMFest, Digital Desperados, Entzaubert, Frameline, Heels on Wheels, MIX NYC, National Queer Arts Festival, Queer Women of Color Film Festival, and the Vancouver Queer Film Festival, among others. www.celestechan.com	Photo credit: Nogga Schwartz
Photo courtesy of the artist	Ryka Aoki has been honored by the California State Senate for “extraordinary commitment to free speech and artistic expression, as well as the visibility and well-being of Transgender people.” Her chapbook Sometimes Too Hot the Eye of Heaven Shines, won RADAR Productions’ 2010 Eli Coppola Award. Her collection, Seasonal Velocities was a finalist for a 2013 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction. Her novel, He Mele a Hilo (Topside Signature Press) is being released as you read this. Ryka also appears in Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation (Seal Press), Transfeminist Perspectives (Temple University), and The Collection (Topside Press). Ryka is also head instructor of Supernova Martial Arts, whose mission is to empower LGBT youth through martial arts and self-defense. She is a former national judo champion and the founder of the International Transgender Martial Arts Alliance. She is a professor of English at Santa Monica College and of Queer Studies at Antioch University. www.rykaryka.com
Wizard Apprentice Black Futurist. Digital Folk Artist. Music & Video Producer. Wizard Apprentice is a shapeshifting benevolent demon who uses sound to creep into the interior worlds of others. Although her long broad nose might suggest wizard heritage, she is not actually a wizard. Rather, she’s a student of many generous wizard friends whose wisdom helps her navigate (and tolerate) life as human. Her music is influenced by smooth jazz and super NES game soundtracks. Her sun sign is Aquarius/Pisces which might explain the simultaneously detached and deeply intimate quality of her songs. You can tell she’s a demon because her hands look older than they should. Next time you see her, sneak a look at her hands.	Photo courtesy of the artist
Photo courtesy of the artist	Frederick Douglas Kakinami Cloyd was born in Japan shortly after the U.S. Occupation officially ended. His African-American/Cherokee father was an occupation soldier in Korea and Japan while Fredrick’s mother—a Japanese/Chinese/Austro-Hungarian girl of the war-ruins was from an elite nationalist family in Japan. Transnational racisms and sexisms during the rise of U.S. and Japanese global stature present a foundation through which Fredrick weaves his stories of memory and family history.
Lisa Evans is a qpoc actress, poet, youth development worker and a lover of bad horror movies/ good comics. Based out of Oakland, CA, Lisa has performed with several different Bay Area arts organizations and has also represented the broader Bay Area at the 2010 and 2012 National Poetry slam.Lisa most recently performed as a part of Brouhaha: QTPOC Activist-Comics Rise Up and as an ensemble cast member in The Love Balm For My Spirit Child, a theatrical performance based on the testimonies of Bay Area mothers who have lost children to violence. They can also be seen in award-winning filmmaker Cheryl Dunye’s short film Black Is Blue.	Photo courtesy of the artist
Image credit: LAND film still	Lares Feliciano is a queer, bi-racial Puerto Rican artist, filmmaker and writer. She holds her M.F.A. in Cinema Production from San Francisco State University and served as the Artist in Residence at Grand Canyon National Park. It is her goal as a filmmaker to tell queer stories, untold stories, and to make space for communities often left out of mainstream media.Currently in development: LAND: a feature narrative that takes place in the western landscape of the post-apocalyptic future and EL GRITO DE LARES: an animation that tells the story of the Puerto Rican revolution after which the filmmaker is named. www.laresfeliciano.com
Baruch Porras Hernandez has performed his writing all over California. He’s featured at poetry events in Canada, Washington D.C. NYC, from Museums to barbershops, to universities and even caves. He is a Lambda Literary Fellow in Poetry, his work can be found in several anthologies, like Assaracus , issue 17th with Sibling Rivalry Press, and Aim for the Head the Zombie Poetry Anthology, Multiverse the Super Hero Anthology both with Write Bloody Publishing. He’s performed at Yerba Buena Center for The Arts, SOMArts, Counter Pulse, told stories with The Shout, is a winner of Best of Bawdy Storytelling, and is a winner of The Moth Storytelling Contest in L.A. He represented San Francisco in the The Moth’s Grand Championship in L.A. and finished in second place. He’s featured at Writers with Drinks, SF Write Club, and Marga Gomez’s Performerama. For the past 6 years he’s been the curator and head organizer for The San Francisco Queer Open Mic and has organized and hosted literary shows with KQED. To find out more, go to baruchporrasherandez.wordpress.com. He was born in Toluca, Mexico and likes gummy bears.	Photo courtesy of the artist
	Việt Lê is an artist, writer, and independent curator. Dr. Lê is an Assistant Professor in the Visual Studies Program | Visual & Critical Studies Graduate Program at California College of the Arts. He has exhibited and lectured on his work in Europe, Asia, South America, and North America. Lê has been published in positions: asia critique; Crab Orchard Review; American Quarterly; Amerasia Journal; Art Journal; Newsweek Asia; and the anthologies Writing from the Perfume River; Strange Cargo; The Spaces Between Us;Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art; among others. He is a reviews co-editor (with Laura Kina) of Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (Brill). He is a board member of DVAN (Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network).  vietle.net
Lambert Moss hails from New York, New York where he drew inspiration from his time in musical theater and from some of the fiercest drag queens ever. He is now happy to call San Francisco his adopted home. In San Francisco he has performed at CounterPULSE in “Precious Drop” with the Jaara Dance Project and sung back up at The Rrazz Room for a wide range of acts including Justin Bond. You can see Lambert on select friday nights at “SOME THING” belting it out and making his drag mom David GLAMAMORE proud.
Photo courtesy of the artist	Persia was born from the burgeoning creative mind of a child in South Central Los Angeles. With degrees from the University of California, Santa Cruz and the San Francisco Art Institute in one hand, and a few pairs of heels in the other, she set out to conquer and revolutionize the drag community. Persia began performing weekly at Esta Noche, the recently closed Latino gay bar in San Francisco. Whilst performing at events around the Bay Area, in Los Angeles, and Mexico—including a few quinceañeras—Persia has also curated art shows, done stand-up, appeared on a few television shows, modeled, and has represented SFMOMA by transforming into Matisse’s “Woman with a hat.” (Photo courtesy of the artist)
Elena Rose, a Filipina-Ashkenazi trans lesbian mestiza, is a writer, scholar, and survivor from rural Oregon. Dedicated to the project of radical love for those who live at the edges, Rose writes online as “little light” and tours nationally preaching and educating.  She co-curated and headlined the popular National Queer Arts Festival production, Girl Talk: A Cis and Trans Woman Dialogue, and was a founding member of the Speak! Radical Women of Color Media Collective. Her writing has found its way everywhere from law school classrooms and academic conferences to bathroom mirrors and protest marches. Rose currently resides in northern California, where she stays busy being in good stories; she carries a pen, her ancestors, and the mismatched ID of a citizen of the borderlands with her at all times.	Photo credit: Martin Bustamante
Photo courtesy of the artist	Kevin Simmons is a writer, musician and filmmaker originally from New Orleans. His books include the poetry collection Mad for Meat and two edited works, Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality and Ota Benga Under My Mother’s Roof. He wrote the music for the Emmy Award-winning documentary Hope: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica and the stage work Voices of Haiti: A Post-Quake Odyssey in Verse, which ran at the National Black Theatre Festival and the FOKAL Centre (Port-au-Prince, Haiti) and was featured on PBS NewsHour. His fellowships and commissions include those from Cave Canem, Creative Work Fund, Fulbright, Pulitzer Center and San Francisco Arts Commission. He spends his time in San Francisco and Japan.
SPULU, grew up in Oakland, CA where he discovered dance at a very early age. Dance not only became an escape from the violence he was experiencing at home and in his neighborhood, but developed into a passion. SPULU started learning Pacific Islander Cultural movements from his mother. As he got older he started exploring other dance genres such as ballet, modern, jazz, african, and other cultural dance styles. Since then SPULU has danced for multiple dance companies in the bay area: Future Shock Oakland, Destiny Arts, Chapkis Dance, and is now currently dancing with City College of San Francisco Strong Pulse Dance Company and Culture Shock Oakland. He is the Director for Future Shock Oakland and founder for House of Chiefs (HOC). His dance style is a modern contemporary fusion of Pacific Islander Cultural movement and hip hop. In the future, SPULU hopes to finish school and open a visual and performing arts school for low-income students. (Photo credit: Stories of Queer Diaspora)

Thank You To Our Funders

QUEER REBELS FEST is presented by API Cultural Center’s United States of Asian America Festival, and Queer Cultural Center’s National Queer Arts Festival. Thank you to our sponsors: Horizons Foundation, Red Envelope Giving Circle, Zellerbach Family Fund, and generous community donors!