NATIONAL QUEER ARTS FESTIVAL
Queer artists have been making worlds here since 1998.
The National Queer Arts Festival is QCC’s signature multidisciplinary arts festival: an expansive home for performance, visual art, music, theater, film, and work that resists easy categorization.
The festival is pausing. The work is not.
QCC will not produce the National Queer Arts Festival during our 2026–2027 program year.
This pause gives us time to repair and strengthen the systems beneath the festival: our finances, program architecture, artist agreements, production practices, archives, governance, donor infrastructure, and community relationships.
We are using this period to build an organization—and a festival—that can sustain queer cultural work with greater care, clarity, and accountability.
COMING IN 2028
TRANSFIGURATIONS
The 30th National Queer Arts Festival
In 1998, QCC’s first National Queer Arts Festival included FACES, an inaugural visual-art exhibition documenting queer life at a moment of profound visibility, political struggle, and loss.
Thirty festivals later, QCC will return to that beginning with TRANSFIGURATIONS – an extension and reimagining of FACES for another generation.
What has changed across thirty festivals? What has endured? How do queer and trans artists imagine themselves beyond the terms through which institutions and dominant cultures attempt to define them?
TRANSFIGURATIONS will revisit the body as a site of contestation, identity, recognition, transformation, surveillance, kinship, memory, and queer possibility.
The exhibition will place new work in conversation with QCC’s archive, connecting the artists and questions that shaped the festival’s beginning with those shaping its future.
NEARLY THREE DECADES OF QUEER ART
Built by artists. Held by community.
Since 1998, NQAF has created space for experimentation, connection, memory, and possibility across the San Francisco Bay Area.
The festival has presented hundreds of events and thousands of LGBTQ+ artists—from internationally recognized figures to artists finding an early home for their work on QCC stages.
Its history lives in performances, exhibitions, gatherings, catalogues, photographs, recordings, and the relationships formed between artists and audiences over nearly three decades.
Explore the festival archive →