Djuna Barnes was an American artist, illustrator, journalist, and writer who is perhaps best known for her novel Nightwood (1936), a cult classic of lesbian fiction and an important work of modernist literature.
Midori (美登里) is a sexologist, educator, author, artist, speaker, and coach. Midori wrote the first English language book with instruction on Japanese Rope Bondage and continues to write on alternative sexual practices, including BDSM and sexual fetishism, bondage, erotic fiction, and more. She teaches classes, presents at conferences, coaches individuals and professionals, and facilitates in-depth weekend intensives. She is based in San Francisco, California.
Elsa Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven (née Else Hildegard Plötz; was a German-born avant-garde visual artist and poet, who was active in Greenwich Village, New York, from 1913 to 1923, where her radical self-displays came to embody a living Dada. She was considered one of the most controversial and radical women artists of the era.
Thelma Ellen Wood was an American artist, specialising in the traditional fine line drawing technique known as Silverpoint. She was noted for her hectic private life, and her lesbian relationship with Djuna Barnes was fictionalized in Barnes' novel Nightwood.
Ladies Almanack, its complete title being Ladies Almanack: showing their Signs and their Tides; their Moons and their Changes; the Seasons as it is with them; their Eclipses and Equinoxes; as well as a full Record of diurnal and nocturnal Distempers, written & illustrated by a lady of fashion, was written by Djuna Barnes in 1928. This roman à clef catalogues the amorous intrigues of Barnes' lesbian network centered in Natalie Clifford Barney's salon in Paris. Written as a winking pastiche of Restoration wit, the slender volume is illustrated by Barnes's Elizabethan-inspired woodcuts.
Yuki Kihara is an interdisciplinary artist of Japanese and Samoan descent. In 2008, her work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; it was the first time a New Zealander had been the subject of one-person show at the institution. Titled Shigeyuki Kihara: Living Photographs, the exhibition opened from 7 October 2008 to 1 February 2009. Kihara's self-portrait photographs in the exhibitions included nudes in poses that portrayed colonial images of Polynesian people as sexual objects. Her exhibition was followed by an acquisition of Kihara's work for the museum's collection.
Anna Berndtson is a performance artist.
Asta Gröting is a contemporary artist. She works in a variety of media like sculpture, performance, and video. In her work, Gröting “is conceptually and emotionally asking questions of the social body by taking something away from it and allowing this absence to do the talking.”
Nathalie Braun Barends, also known as Petsire, is an international multi-media artist whose work includes paintings, photography, video, light installations and happenings. Her works are shown, and part of collections, in museums and cultural institutions worldwide.
Mary Cappello is a writer and professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Rhode Island. She is the author of five books of literary nonfiction, and her essays and experimental prose have been published in The Georgia Review, Salmagundi and Cabinet Magazine. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Salon, The Huffington Post, in guest author blogs for Powell's Books, and on six separate occasions as Notable Essay of the Year in Best American Essays. A 2011 Guggenheim Fellow in Creative Arts/Nonfiction, she recently received a 2015 Berlin Prize from The American Academy in Berlin, a fellowship awarded to scholars, writers, composers, and artists who represent the highest standards of excellence in their fields.
Pola Sieverding is a German photographer and video artist. She works in the field of lens based media.
Jonny Star is a German artist. Until 2011 she worked as an artist under her given name Gabriele-Maria Scheda. She lives and works in Berlin and in New York City, United States
Nathalie Claude is a self-described "actress, director, dancer, choreographer, writer, and a sometimes MC, Drag King, clown, artistic coach and musician" from Montreal. She works in French and in English and sometimes creates bilingual performances.
Andrea Geyer is a German and American multi-disciplinary artist who lives and works in New York City. With a particular focus on those who identify or at some point were identified as women, her works use photography, performance, video, drawing and painting to activate the lingering potential of specific events, sites, or biographies. Geyer focus on the themes of gender, class, national identity and how they are constantly negotiated and reinterpreted against a frequent backdrop of cultural meanings and memories. Geyer has exhibited at institutions such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), MOMA, and The Whitney Museum.
Grada Kilomba is a Portuguese interdisciplinary artist and writer whose works critically examine memory, trauma, gender, racism and post-colonialism. She uses various formats to express herself ranging from text to scenic reading and performance. Moreover, she combines academic and lyrical narrative. In 2012, she was guest professor for gender and postcolonial studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
Lena Henke is a German sculptor, photographer and installation artist.
Stefanie Hessler is a German-born contemporary art curator, an art writer, and the current director of Swiss Institute in New York. From 2019 to 2022 she was the director of Kunsthall Trondheim in Trondheim, Norway.
Queer art, also known as LGBT+ art or queer aesthetics, broadly refers to modern and contemporary visual art practices that draw on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender+ imagery and issues. While by definition there can be no singular "queer art", contemporary artists who identify their practices as queer often call upon "utopian and dystopian alternatives to the ordinary, adopt outlaw stances, embrace criminality and opacity, and forge unprecedented kinships and relationships." Queer art is also occasionally very much about sex and the embracing of unauthorised desires.
Ayana M. Evans, is an African-American performance artist and educator based in New York City and an adjunct professor of visual art at Brown University. She also serves as editor-at-large of Cultbytes, an online art publication.
Gabriela Ruiz, also known as Leather Papi, is a Mexican-American artist based in Los Angeles, California, who works primarily in sculpture and performance art.
