iO Tillett Wright | |
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| Born | September 2, 1985 New York City, U.S. |
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iO Tillett Wright (born September 2, 1985) is an American author, photographer, [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] actor, TV and podcast host, and activist. [6] [7] [8] After growing up in New York City, he founded street art magazine Overspray and served as its editor-in-chief until 2009. From 2010 to 2012 he was a featured columnist for T Magazine with two regular blogs. In 2016, he co-hosted MTV show Suspect with Nev Schulman.
Wright grew up in New York City with his mother, Rebecca Wright, a poet and actress. He attended Brockwood Park School in England. [9] [10] [11] [12] Wright is a transgender man. He documented the struggles of his upbringing in his memoir Darling Days. [13] [14]
In 2002, at the age of 17, Wright founded and served as editor-in-chief of a street art magazine, Overspray , [15] until 2009. [16]
From 2010 to 2012, Wright was a featured columnist for T Magazine , at The New York Times where he had two blogs called Notes From The Underground—for which iO reviewed underground performances—and The Lowdown. [17]
Wright's first book, Darling Days, A Memoir [18] was released on September 27, 2016, by Ecco Books, an imprint of HarperCollins.
Wright's second book, Self Evident Truths: 10,000 Portraits of Queer America, has been published on September 15, 2020, by Prestel.
Wright's third book, Oasis: Modern Desert Homes Around The World, has been published in November, 2020, by Clarkson Potter.
In 2012, Wright delivered a talk at TEDxWomen in Washington, DC, called Fifty Shades Of Gay, [19] discussing sexuality and gender as a spectrum. The talk has been viewed over 3 million times. [20]
Wright is a self-taught photographer [21] who, on September 22, 2010, opened Breedings, his first solo show of photographs, at Fuse Gallery in Manhattan. In August 2011, Wright debuted Camila, his second solo show, and Act Like You're Fine, a group show he curated at Tokyo's Vacant Gallery.
Since 2010, Wright has been working on a project called Self Evident Truths that examines Americans, asking them whether they are "other than straight", and photographing respondents who self-evaluate themselves to be "anything other than 100% straight". [22] To date, Wright has photographed 10,000 people in all 50 of the United States. [23] On September 15, 2020, a monograph, called "Self Evident Truths: 10,000 Portraits of Queer America" that includes all ten thousand images, has been published by Prestel, with a foreword by Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors.
As an actor, Wright appeared in several independent films, including in a 2004 appearance as a McDonald's worker in Sex and the City , and after an over decade long hiatus, with a part in the feature film Holy New York (2020). [24]
In 2016, Wright co-hosted the MTV show Suspect with Nev Schulman. [25] [26] [27] [28]
In 2017, Wright was a co-host with Max Joseph, on Episode 6 of Season 6 of MTV's, Catfish: The TV Show . [29]
In 2019, Wright produced and hosted The Ballad Of Billy Balls, a true crime investigation of the murder of the love of his mother's life.
Coming out of the closet, often shortened to coming out, is a metaphor used to describe LGBTQ people's self-disclosure of their sexual orientation, romantic orientation, or gender identity.
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Overspray Magazine was a street art magazine, named after the term "overspray". The magazine was founded by a group of artists headed by iO Tillett Wright in 2002 whose mission was to document and further art on the street as well as the people and culture surrounding it. Overspray was a quarterly magazine showcasing known and unknown artists, reviews on books and films, fictional writing, and event recaps. The magazine also hosted events and gallery shows, allowing artists to participate in open environments with few guidelines. It ceased publication in 2009.
Janet Jackson is an American pop and R&B singer and actress. Jackson garnered a substantial gay following during the 1990s as she gained prominence in popular music. Recognized as a long-term ally of the LGBTQ community, Jackson received the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Music Album for her Grammy Award-winning sixth studio album The Velvet Rope (1997), which spoke out against homophobia and embraced same-sex love. In 2005, Jackson received the Humanitarian Award from the Human Rights Campaign and AIDS Project Los Angeles in recognition of her involvement in raising funds for AIDS Charities and received the Vanguard Award at the 19th Annual GLAAD Media Awards in 2008. In June 2012, Jackson announced she was executive producing a documentary on the lives of transgender people around the world titled Truth, saying she agreed to sign on to help stop discrimination against the transgender community.
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Wright, 26, grew up as a female in Manhattan
the attendance sheet told them I was assigned female at birth
