NATIONAL QUEER ARTS FESTIVAL
Making new worlds for queer artists since the ’90s.
QCC’s signature multidisciplinary arts festival is an expansive home for performance, visual art, music, theater, film, and work that resists easy categorization.
2026–2027 PROGRAM YEAR
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
TRANSGRESS
THE 30TH
NATIONAL QUEER
ARTS FESTIVAL
In 1998, QCC’s first National Queer Arts Festival included FACE, 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 TRANSGRESS – an extension and reimagining of FACE for a new generation.
TRANSGRESS will explore the concept of bodies as sites 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.
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?
THE FESTIVAL ARCHIVE
29 festival cycles of queer art.
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.