DUETS Book Launch: Kia LaBeija & Julie Tolentino In Conversation

Participant Biographies

Vivian Crockett is a New York–based, Brazilian-American researcher, scholar, and curator specializing in modern and contemporary art, currently working independently with various institutions including Visual AIDS. She is a PhD candidate in Art History at Columbia University whose work focuses largely on art of African diasporas, (Afro) Latinx diasporas, and the Americas at the varied intersections of race, gender, and queer theory. She was the co-curator of Visual AIDS' 28th annual Day With(out) Art, ALTERNATE ENDINGS, RADICAL BEGINNINGS. Vivian was the 2017-18 Mellon Museum Research Consortium Fellow in Media and Performance Art at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and is currently a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum.

Lia Gangitano is director of Participant Inc, New York, a not-for-profit art space she founded in 2001. She has previously served as curator of Thread Waxing Space, New York; associate curator of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and curatorial advisor at MoMA PS1, New York. She is a recipient of the Skowhegan Governors’ Award for Outstanding Service to Artists (2015), the inaugural White Columns/Shoot the Lobster Award (2016), and the Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence (2018). She teaches at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

Kia LaBeija is an artist born and raised in the heart of New York, Hell’s Kitchen. Her art explores her personal narrative and the relationship between space, memory, and womanhood. Her current work comprises cinematic and vibrant autobiographical self-portraits. A performer by nature, she is established as a world-renowned voguer, dancer, and performance artist through her role as Overall Mother of the Iconic House of LaBeija. A Visual AIDS Artist Member since 2014, LaBeija has taken part in numerous Visual AIDS programs over the years; has been featured in the Visual AIDS exhibitions Ephemera as Evidence (2014), Party Out of Bounds: Nightlife as Activism since 1980 (2015), and Everyday (2016); and was a commissioned video artist for Visual AIDS’s Day With(out) Art 2017, ALTERNATE ENDINGS, RADICAL BEGINNINGS. She is a 2019 Creative Capital Awardee alongside her partner Taina Larot for their upcoming project Wom(y)n With a Y.

Julie Tolentino creates intimate movement based durational performance installations and has been presented in the US, UK, Europe, Southeast Asia, and Abu Dhabi. Tolentino was a member of ACT UP, House of Color and Art+Positive, National LGBT Suicide Hotline, and ran the Clit Club with a dedicated crew from 1990 to 2002. For Visual AIDS, her work was featured in the exhibition curated by Joshua Lubin-Levy and Ricardo Montez, Ephemera as Evidence (2014), highlighting the Clit Club Archive and their grassroots Safer Sex Handbook for Lesbians (co-authored with Cynthia Madansky), and Party Out of Bounds: Nightlife as Activism since 1980 (2015) and public talk “The Hardcorps: Clubs, Sex, Activism, Bodies,” with Aldo Hernandez, at La MaMa La Galleria, New York. Tolentino was a commissioned video artist for Visual AIDS’s Day With(out) Art 2014, ALTERNATE ENDINGS and is included in Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic: An Oral History Project, a program of the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. She received the 2018 Pieter Performance Space and BOFFO Residency grants, and is the 2019 recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Art Award in Performance.