National Queer Arts Festival
QCC stages an annual month-long multidisciplinary National Queer Arts Festival, documents significant Bay Area Queer arts events on our Website, provides fundraising and other technical assistance services to emerging culturally-specific and gender-specific Queer arts groups, and conducts “Creating Queer Community,” a program that to date has commissioned more than 120 San Francisco-based artists to create new work.
Since 1998, QCC has organized an annual month-long National Queer Arts Festival. Since 1998, QCC has organized an annual month-long National Queer Arts Festival. To date, these Festivals have presented more than 800 different events featuring over 1000 Queer artists including Bill T. Jones, Alice Walker, Robert Rauschenberg, Meredith Monk, Adrienne Rich, Marga Gomez, Justin Chin, Thom Gunn, Cherrie Moraga and Dorothy Allison. The festival is the largest queer arts festivals in North America.
Artistic Director’s Welcome
The 2018 National Queer Arts Festival
#Resist
This year’s theme—#Resist—for the National Queer Arts Festival seems a natural progression. With the systematic cruelty, hate speech and “fake facts” that are besieging all of our communities, it was time to both withstand and take action: the very definitions of Resist.
Associate Artistic Director Ramona Webb and I challenged the artists working with the theme to queer this definition; to value stillness and/or create action. We felt action is more productive than simply as a reaction. That’s what we want for our community: To apply the arts & activism (artivism) to move forward, while protecting ourselves and reaching out to connect other communities who are being systematically harmed by this administration’s practices.
The programs our artists have created reflect the genius, resilience, strength and beauty of our community and share our vision of equitable living and loving through artistic community engagement.
We hope to see you at the festival!
Pamela Peniston – Artistic Director
Board of Directors
Blackberri, Cheryl Dunye, Storm Miguel Florez, Jacqueline Francis (President), Jeff Jones, Juba Kalamka, Việt Lê, Rudy Lemcke, Pamela S. Peniston, Maria Rangel, Tina Takemoto
Advisory Board – Dr. Marcy Adelman, Mia Nakano, Darius Bost
2018 NQAF Staff
Pamela Peniston – artistic director
Ramona Webb – associate artistic director
Rudy Lemcke –communications & education director
Krista Smith – development director
The Lady Ms Vagina Jenkins – development associate
LaVette Virden – finance manager
Sarah Guerra – production manager
Den— print catalog design
PSPrint – festival printing
