THE FEATH3R THEORY + THE INVISIBLE DOG PRESENTS
PRIDE MUSIC VIDEO FESTIVAL
The effort of the PRIDE MUSIC VIDEO FESTIVAL is to put money in artists hands, to respect the labor of their work, engage with a wide audience online, and celebrate queer creativity!
All June long Featuring LGBTQIAA artists from all over. 10 world premiere music videos celebrating Pride. Each weekend in June we will release new music videos along with short interviews between Raja Feather Kelly and the artist.
PRIDE is actually NOT a parade, it is NOT a circuit party, and it AIN’T a Carly Rae Jepsen or Beyoncé secret release. PRIDE is a celebration of the culture that we make and put out into the world so that the world can celebrate us. US = The LESBIAN, GAY, BI-SEXUAL, TRANS, QUEER, QUESTIONING, INTERSEX, ASEXUAL, AND our ALLIES. So what I am getting at is that you can’t CANCEL Pride. You CAN Cancel Lana Del Rey. You cannot cancel PRIDE.
Pride Music Video Festival began with a $5,000 commission meant to put money directly into the hands of Artists. This first 10 each received $500. With more donations we can and will include more artist! Please make your donation below. Your donation is tax-deductible.
WATCH AN INTERVIEW WITH RAJA FEATHER KELLY (CURATOR) & LUCIEN ZAYAN (PRESENTER)
Raja Feather Kelly
Raja Feather Kelly is a choreographer, director, and the artistic director of the feath3r theory. A three-time winner of the Princess Grace Award, Raja is the 2019–2020 Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist at New York Live Arts, a Creative Associate at The Juilliard School, an inaugural Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, a 2019 Creative Capital award recipient, and a resident artist at HERE Arts Center and the Artist Laureate at The Invisible Dog since 2013. Over the past decade, Kelly has created fifteen evening-length premieres with his company the feath3r theory as well as directing and choreographing extensively for Off-Broadway theatre in New York City. He was nominated for the 2019 and 2020 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Choreography. His choreography has also garnered a 2018 Breakout Award from the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation, and a 2020 Outer Critics Circle Award. Raja was Dance Magazine's inaugural Harkness Promise Award (2018) and cover star February 2020. Raja is the choreographer for the 2019 Pulizter Prize winning Drama FAIRVIEW, written by Jackie Sibblies-Drury; directed by Sarah Benson and the 2010 Pulitzer Prize winning Musical A STRANGE LOOP, Written by Michael R. Jackson; directed by Stephen Brackett. Frequent collaborators include: Lileana Blain-Cruz, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, and Sarah Benson. He was born in Fort Hood, Texas and holds a B.A. in Dance and English from Connecticut College.
Lucien Zayan
Born in 1965 in Marseille (France) from Egyptian born parents, Lucien Zayan spent 25 years working for some of the most prestigious French cultural institutions among them Théâtre de l’Odéon - Théâtre de l’Europe (Paris), Festival International d’Art Lyrique (Aix-en-Provence), Theatre de la Criée (Marseille), Théâtre de la Madeleine (Paris). In 2009, he moved to Brooklyn and created The Invisible Dog Art Center. Since 2018, he is the executive chef at la Salle A Manger, a food-art related dinning room associated to the arts center. Zayan lives and works on Bergen street, Brooklyn. He recently became American citizen, and married his american lover in Gray (Maine). After loosing this french accent for a perfect American one, he decided to bring it back to look like more Catherine Deneuve than Liz Taylor.
WEEK 5: JULY 3 – 5
Aaron Samuel Davis
Currently Residing: Bremen, Germany
Social Media: @aaronsamueldavis_
Aaron Samuel Davis is an African-American choreographer, performer, and teaching artist. He has worked/engaged with artists: David Rousseve/ REALITY, The Limón Dance Company, David Dorfman Dance, Kyle Abraham/A.I.M, Raja Feather Kelly/the feath3r theory, Nicholas Leichter Dance, Giorgia Maddamma, Ben J Riepe, and 10 Hairy Legs. He received his BA in Classical Studies and Dance from Connecticut College. He trained with the devoted Libby Nye (Limón Dance Company) and studied overseas at Folkwang University of the Arts in Germany. He holds an MFA from NYU Tisch School of the Arts, with concentrations in choreography and performance. His research focuses on the application of cinematic approaches to contemporary concert dance making. His choreographic works have been showcased internationally. He is the recipient of the 2019 Förderpreis für Darstellende Kunst recognized by the German government and the city of Dusseldorf. Aaron currently works as a performer with dance company Unusual Symptoms in residence at Theater Bremen. He is a human who dances, an artistic collaborator, and an uncle to fifteen. This 2020 calendar year, we celebrate pride from a distance but never in isolation! Thank you for your time, it is a pleasure to be a part of the Pride Music Video Festival! www.aaronsamueldavis.com
Tips: PayPal asd335@nyu.edu
Michi Ilona Osato aka sister selva
Currently Residing: New York, NY
Social Media: @sisterselva + @brassburlesque
Michi Ilona Osato aka sister selva is a burlesque & drag performer born and raised in the East Village of NYC, currently splitting residence between the states of anxiety and boundless liberation. Her work explores the intersections of sensuality, nature, gender, and race, and is always rooted in healing.
Working since age 3, she has performed across NYC as both an ittybitty baby and as a big naked adult, in venues such as Lincoln Center Out Of Doors, the Joyce Theater and at the New Museum and Brooklyn Museum with performance collective Lavender Hill Historical Society. Michi has appeared on television shows including Sesame Street and High Maintenance and her writing can be found with sister Una in adrienne mares brown's bestselling book Pleasure Activism. She was a central producing member of Mariposa & the Saint, a groundbreaking performance about solitary confinement, and as a a co-founder of brASS Burlesque, a queer POC performance company, her work has been featured in the New York Times, Teen Vogue, NowThis, and NPR’s CodeSwitch.
She considers all of her work, from Stripping to Acupuncture to Composting to Clowning, to be healing work.
Tips: Venmo @michi-osato
Carlo Antonio Villanueva
Currently Residing: New York, NY
Social Media: @carloantonio
Carlo Antonio Villanueva is a queer Filipino-American performing artist living and working in New York. His work in performance and choreography follows deep curiosities about and among Form, mischief, authenticity, and perspective. www.carloantoniovillanueva.com
Tips: Paypal carloantonio.villanueva@gmail.com
WEEK 4: JUNE 26 – 28
Peter Clough
Currently Residing: Harlem, NY
Social Media: @cloughabunga
Peter Clough is an artist, activist, and curator, working across media to explore queer sexuality, gender, and fetish. Clough's work is insistently vulnerable, celebrating personal narrative as a political tool and queer strategy. Clough’s work is rooted in collage, cutting and manipulating images of their own body to create works that exist on the borders of desire and repulsion, sexiness and silliness, pleasure and suffering.
Peter Clough was born in Boston in 1984 and received a BA from Grinnell College in 2006 and an MFA from NYU Steinhardt in 2009. Clough has presented work in New York at MoMA PS1, The Invisible Dog Art Center, Printed Matter, haul gallery, Fresh Window Gallery, Microscope Gallery, Southfirst Gallery, Wayfarers Gallery, LeRoy Neiman Gallery, SPRING/BREAK Art Fair, the Center for Performance Research, and Dixon Place Theater, in Pittsburg at the Andy Warhol Museum, in L.A. at Human Resources, in Nashville at Open Lot, in Berlin at Peres Projects and Space/Time at FLUTGRABEN e.V., in Seoul at Konkuk University and The House of Collections, in Antwerp at the Monty, in Ghent at Off/off Cinema and in Oslo at Kunstnernes Hus, Fotogalleriet, and SOPPEN Performance Festival at Ekebergparken. Clough’s work has been featured in The New York Times, Frieze, Hyperallergic, and Time Out Magazine. Clough lives and works in Harlem, New York. www.peterclough.net
Tips: Venmo @cloughabunga
Randy Ford
Currently Residing: Seattle, WA
Social Media: @randybaby11
Randy Ford, is a Seattle-born dancer, choreographer, actor, and activist. She grew up learning choreography in her living room from watching music videos as a child. It wasn’t until the age of 17 when performing became a reality. After some time at the University of Washington, she became a member of Seattle’s Au Collective, a collective of artists committed to bringing womxn, queer people, and people of color to the forefront of everything it does. She has been featured in Velocity Dance Center’s Next Fest NW, CD Forum’s Showing Out: Contemporary Black Choreographers (2016, 2018), Bumbershoot Festival, Birthday Girl Series #5, Legendary Children at Seattle Art Museum, and Beacon Hill Block Party, among other community events. Casted as Lady in Jerome A. Parker’s House of Dinah at On the Boards, she's been recognized on City Arts Magazine's 2018 Future List and received a SeattleDances 2016 DanceCrush Award.
Randy has worked with artists such as Dani Tirrell (Genre Bender, Black Bois), Markeith Wiley (IT’S NOT TOO LATE), Kitten N’ Lou (CAMPTACULAR, Jingle All The Gay), and BenDeLaCreme (Beware the Terror of Gaylord Manor). Identifying as a Black non-binary Transfemme, her work continues the conversation about and centering intersectionality. When not onstage she's a program leader through ArtsCorps at Dimmit Middle School and Meeker Middle School. She's a guest teacher at Seattle Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a MixxedFit Instructor at the Northwest African American Museum. www.therandyford.com
Tips: Venmo @Randy-ford-3
Samantha Nye & Emily Wells
Currently Residing: New York, NY & Philadelphia, PA
Social Media: @samantha_nye_studio & @emilywellsmusic
Samantha Nye
Samantha Nye is a painter and video artist currently living in Manhattan. For the first decade of her life she was a relatively unsuccessful child model. At five years old she remembers her mother driving her to South Beach casting offices as she energetically rehearsed the line, “Hello, my name is Samantha Nye, and I’m 7 years old... This is my right profile...” She often performed seven.
She learned early about performance and identity, which has directed her studio practice towards the investigation of seduction through reenactment. Her paintings, videos and installations highlight aging bodies, celebrate queer kinship, and facilitate an intergenerational dialogue about sexuality between queer women and their mothers/grandmothers.
Samantha was a fellow of the 2014-2015 Queer/Art Mentorship, a 2018 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Traveling Scholar and has exhibited with The Yossi Milo Gallery, The Wallach Gallery and The Leslie-Lohman Museum Project Space. She is currently preparing for her first museum show at The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston scheduled to open in the spring of 2021.
Tips: Venmo @Samantha-Nye-1
Emily Wells
My work bridges pop and chamber music and explores concepts around human relation to the natural world rooted in a love for both. I am interested in the ways performance and recordings influence one another and I work in both realms. My work also interacts with my video practice through projection at performances which intersects imagery of contemporary dance, extreme weather and effects of climate crisis, and protest footage from ACT UP. www.emilywellsmusic.com
Tips: PayPal paypal.me/thesisandinstinct
WEEK 3: JUNE 19 – 21
Garrett Allen
Currently Residing: Brooklyn, NY
Social Media: @garrettallenn
Garrett Allen is a Black, queer interdisciplinary artist working primarily in performance, video, and installation. Their work navigates the recent, dramatic changes in the ways we consume, perceive, process, identify, and, ultimately, empathize. They create pieces that are urgent, emotionally vulnerable, unapologetic, and visceral; aiming to combat spectator (and general worldly) passivity by collaboratively creating sensorial and actively engaging experiences. Their recent projects include co-creating BLK MLK (blackmilk) with poet Kyle Lopez (Spectrum NYC), co-directing Dionne Slay’s Slaychella summer concert (LPAC), directing ...When The World Is No Longer: by Dante Green (ANTFEST, Polyphone Festival), and devising/creating We Were All Rooting For You (Flamboyan). Their video and performance art works have been exhibited at School of Visual Arts NYC, Harvard, Knockdown Center, Signal Gallery, The Deep End, and You Are Here. garrett-allen.com
Music: “A Comma” by serpentwithfeet
With Chidi Amadiume, Joshuah Campbell, Dante Green, Nile Harris, Wonza Johnson, Ashton Muñiz, Marcus “Zebra” Smith, Quenton Stuckey, Valentino Valentin, and Gobi-Kla Vonan
Tips: Venmo @garrettallenn
Una Aya Osato
Currently Residing: New York, NY
Social Media: @thisisuna
Una Aya Osato is a performer, writer and educator born and raised in NYC, who dynamically merges their art and politics. They've been featured in the New York Times, NowThis, Teen Vogue, HuffPost, MSNBC, to name a few. Una’s been performing in NYC for over three decades. And they've been writing, performing, and producing their award-winning original work for over fifteen years, performing nationally and internationally for tens of thousands of people in theaters, festivals, universities, conferences, community organizations, classrooms, and prisons. A collective Una is a part of was in the group exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum "Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall". Una is also a co-founder of the renowned troupe brASS: Brown RadicalAss Burlesque, who have monthly queer cabaret show called "Compost Bin!". Una and their sister Michi's written work can be found in adrienne maree brown's New York Times Best Selling book "Pleasure Activism”. unaosato.com
Tips: Zelle QuickPay: Una Osato
Email: una.osato@gmail.com
x
Currently Residing: Homeless in Brooklyn, NY (Lenape land)
Social Media: @tittyglow.jpeg
Pronouns: they/themme/etc. x makes all kinds of things and does all the things and enjoys questionings and musings and the performative nature of living as a human and playing games and fulfilling roles and disappointing others; they extrapolate the double consciousness of post modernism and being multiply marginalized by creating multimedia installation and movement based conceptual art about the bõhdë~~~ x-itsjustx.com
Tips and Reparations: Venmo @justx
WEEK 2: JUNE 12 – 14
Kevin Shotwell
Currently Residing: Wilmington, DE/New York, NY
Social Media: @keviquickchange
Kevin Shotwell is a New York based Choreographer/ Performance Artist. Known best for his self described “world renowned” Instagram handle @keviquickchange, which explores the thankless art of quick changes! And the Annual The Jingle Belle Ball, “Non Denominational Christmas Themed Performance Art Cabaret”, which he writes/ directs/ and stars in. Has over 15 years of experience in theatre and has performed all over the east coast. Acting highlights include the 2009 Broadway revival of Bye Bye Birdie. A graduate of Pace University- BFA in Musical Theatre.
Tips: marshap.org/donate
Becca Blackwell
Currently Residing: New York, NY
Social Media: @theirishhorse
Becca Blackwell is a NYC based trans actor, performer and writer. Existing between genders, and preferring the pronoun “they”; Blackwell works collaboratively with playwrights and directors to expand our sense of personhood and the body through performance. Some of their collaborations have been with Young Jean Lee, Half Straddle, Jennifer Miller’s Circus Amok, Richard Maxwell, Erin Markey, Sharon Hayes, Theater of the Two Headed Calf and Lisa D’Amour. Film/TV includes: Ramy, High Maintenance, Marriage Story, Shameless, Deadman’s Barstool, and Jack in the Box. Becca is a
recipient of the Doris Duke Impact Artist Award, Franklin Furnace Award
and the Creative Capital Award. www.beccablackwell.com
Tips: Venmo @Becca-Blackwell
Brian Gonzalez
Currently Residing: New York, NY
Social Media: @taxiplasm
Brian Gonzalez is a queer LatinX filmmaker, interdisciplinary artist, and educator working in a variety of mediums including video art, immersive installation, virtual reality, and performance, all under the artistic pseudonym TAXIPLASM. He has shown video work in Times Square (Midnight Moment), Art Basel Miami Beach, NADA Art Fair, Lincoln Center’s Dance On Camera, and many more, along with residencies for multi-media performance at The Robert Wilson Watermill Center, The Standard, and the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas. He is currently a 2020 Returning Fellow at Town Stages for Immersive
Performance and the 2020/21 Queer|Art Mentorship Fellow for narrative
feature filmmaking. www.taxiplasm.com
Tips: Venmo @Brian-Gonzalez-2
WEEK 1: JUNE 5 – 7
2FIK
Currently Residing: Montréal (QC)
Social Media: @2fikOrNot2Fik
2Fik is a French-born Quebecer artist of Moroccan heritage. He is the artistic director, director and model of his works, creating performances, videos and images that toy with identities, beliefs, sexualities and immigration. His stories of queer migration are constructed with rigor and humor, and the collection of characters he portrays is brought to vibrant life, each one a fully realized individual. www.2fikornot2fik.com
Jack Murphy
Currently Residing: Michigan/NYC
Social Media: @jackmurphy
Jack Murphy is originally from Novi, Michigan and currently attends at The Juilliard School in New York City. He began choreographing as a trainee with the Joffrey Ballet in Chicago and continues creating at Juilliard. Earlier this year his work was selected to be presented in the White Wave Solo Duo Festival 2020. He is thrilled to be a part of “Pride Music Video Festival” and be able to share his work as a proud member of the LGBTQ+ community. I created “Pink Narcissist” from my NYC apartment.
Tips: Venmo @jackmurphy98
