Public Engagement/Screenings

The pandemic is far from over, vaccination is imperfect, long-covid is a significant threat, politics plays hardball with our lives, we are underprepared for the horizon of other viruses, consequences are vastly unequally distributed, and we are likely to be anxious, in denial, and puzzled about how best to respond. In this Roundtable, four prominent artists and scholars will present art and organizing strategies drawn from lived experience with chronic illness, community activism, and the personal and political demands long-hauling presents.

Videomaker and scholar Alexandra Juhasz and writer Theodore Kerr, co-authors of We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production, will discuss the necessarily multiple time frames of long-time HIV/AIDS activism.

Artist Lorie Novak will share and discuss Migraine Register, her durational photographic commitment to making visible the significant impact of this chronic and pervasive but invisible condition.

Writer Meghan O’Rourke, Editor of The Yale Review and author of the New York Times bestselling memoir, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness will consider the challenge of narrating auto-immune and other poorly understood illness when no coherent story readily appears.

Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore (ted) Kerr, along with special guests Rev. Michael J. Crumpler, Cait McKinney, and Amy Sadao, for the launch of their book “We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production,” at the Bureau of General Services, Queer Division.

Doing Things with Stories Narrative Change Residents Alexandra Juhasz and Diana Ocholla deep-dive into how they approach crisis and stories, and invite you to exercise narrative change in five short video episodes. We live with and within crises. We tell stories of crises, and in crises, to make sense of what is happening around us. While crises alienate, stories connect. As scarce resources lead to a withdrawal into the individual, stories bring us back into the collective. Even as crises create a false sense of competition, making different groups battle for the limited opportunities, stories foster a sense of community, bringing us together to see how the problems that we face are shared and collective.

Relational Space (https://www.Relational-Space.org) presents – ‘Long COVID: We Are Here!’ a fearless exploration into the COVID-19 Long-hauler experience.

This video (made with support from NYFA/CAC grant) features:

1- A virtual walk-through of the groundbreaking, immersive VR Arts + Science exhibition ‘Long COVID: We Are Here!’

2- An insightful discussion between the exhibition participants and a panel of Medical experts who are researching and treating patients with Long COVID and ME/CFS.

3- This event is closed with the world premiere of a choreographed piece by Rhapsody James – choreographer, dancer, creative director, and actress – entitled: Long COVID Battle

Marty Fink and Alex Juhasz in intergenerational conversation about the ongoing legacy of HIV caregiving, celebrating the launch of Forget Burial: HIV Kinship, Disability, and Queer/Trans Narratives of Care.

Queer and trans people in the 1980s and early ‘90s were dying of AIDS and the government failed to care. Lovers, strangers, artists, and community activists came together to take care of each other in the face of state violence. This book uncovers how early HIV care-giving narratives actually shape how we continue to understand our genders and our disabilities today.

Purchase Forget Burial: HIV Kinship, Disability, and Queer/Trans Narratives of Care (paperback, $29.95) from the Bureau of General Service Queer Division’s online store: https://tinyurl.com/287j6bx6

Red Stage, The People’s Platform, Astor Place

Q&A with Devon Narine-Singh

Berlinale Teddy Talk with John Greyson, Wieland Speck, and host, Zsombor Bobák

A global pandemic. An afflicted, angry group. A seemingly indifferent government. Reporter Tracie Hunte wanted to understand this moment of pain and confusion by looking back 30 years, and she found a complicated answer to a simple question: When nothing seems to work, how do you make change?

This episode was reported by Tracie Hunte, and produced by Annie McEwen and Tobin Low. Fact-checking by Diane Kelly. 

4-part video essay for H8URS: Video Essays with Real Filmmakers and Professors.

Cheryl Dunye and Alexandra Juhasz join Programmer and Curator Tara Brown to discuss their inventive and funny romance The Watermelon Woman, and reflect on the film’s sexual expression.

PLASMA, University of Buffalo, with Katherine Cheairs, March 2020.

Respondent

Walk through and panel for Metanoia

Metanoia LA public programming

With over 40 contributors from around the world, this issue of the On Curating journal wrestles with “forgetting”, “seeing”, “collecting” and “making” AIDS related culture in the 21st century, and the growing impulse to historize aspects of early responses to the crisis. Through academic essays, conversations, visual projects, reprints and personal reflections, a reader will be exposed to ideas, theories, images, and advice from artists, academics, activists, curators, writers and others around the ethics and practices of curating AIDS-related culture within the ongoing epidemic. At this event, NYC based contributors will share their work, and engage in conversation with each other and guests.

Panelist, CLAGS, CUNY Grad Center.

Margaret Rhee’s Harvard University class presentation about Fake News Poetry Workshops with Chet’la Sebree.

NYU, Cinema Studies Department, panelist.

NYU Performance Studies Department with Barbara Browning.

Advance Screening: Native Son for CUNY. Moderator.

A video program for Metanoia

Programmed with Katherine Cheairs.

The NY Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center

NYU Art Department.

Brooklyn College, Hess Scholar, Jose David Saldivar in conversation with poets and writers. March 2019.

Fake News Poetry Video Workshop with Orr Meniron and Kyle Booten at Dartmouth College Digital Humanities and Social Engagement Center.

Union Docs, Program Moderator. How and why practices subvert the formal and political logics of character-driven storytelling. One response to “Beyond Story.”

Columbia University, “DiAna’s Hair Ego Remix.”

The second Fake News Video-Poetry Workshop occurred on November 3, 2018, in New Haven.

The eleventh Fake News Poetry Workshop occurred on October 2, 2018, in Manhattan NY, led by Cathy James working with ten or more poets in the group “Poets of Course” (formerly Poets of Corsi).

How Do We ReFrame the Conversation on Gender and Intersectionality; featured speaker, September 2018.

September 2018.

This symposium develops out of an oral history project of the same name undertaken by the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, focusing on memories of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and ’90s and features conversations with artists, activists, and oral historians. July 2018.

The Watermelon Woman and Imitation of Life, May 2018.

Lynne DeSilva-Johnson, Occidental College, May 2018.

Margaret Rhee and Chet’la Sebree, NY, May 2018. Supported by Poets & Writers Grant.

With Lisa Cohen, April 2018. Supported by Poets & Writers Grant.

Outliers and American Vanguard Art, April 2018. Screening of The Watermelon Woman.

In conversation with Shu Lea Cheang after films screening, March 2018. A fundraiser for MIX.

Q & A, The Owls, Watermelon Woman, and Filmmakers panel, March 2018.

Fake News Poetry Writing Workshop, March 2018.

Residency and talk, March 2018.

LA, March 2018.

How does queer + black film transform viewers, February 2018. Screening of The Watermelon Woman

Art Exhibition, Pitzer College Art Galleries, #100hardtruths-#fakenews Companion, January 2018.

The Ongoing AIDS Epidemic in Four Documents, January 2018. Screening of We Care.

Home Video: Media Art and AIDS, December 2017. Screening of We Care. Presented by Electronic Arts Intermix.

Guest speaker, August 2017.

8th Floor Gallery, hosted by Sur Rodney Sur and Elia Alba; invited participant, August 2017.

Media Response to HIV, July 2017. Screen We Care.