Rashaad Newsome works at the intersection of art, film, performance, music, technology, and community organizing. Using the diasporic traditions of improvisation, he pulls from the world of advertising, the internet, art history, and Black and Queer culture to produce counter-hegemonic work that shifts between social practice and abstraction. Collage acts as a conceptual and technical method to construct a new visual, performance, sonic, machine learning, and literary language that highlights the immaterial and material expressivity of Black American life. Newsome holds a 2023 Doctoral degree in Fine Arts from the University of Connecticut and a 2001 BFA in Art History from Tulane University. Newsome’s work is in numerous public and private collections and has been exhibited, screened, and performed in galleries, museums, theaters, and festivals throughout the world, including Studio Museum in Harlem, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Park Avenue Armory Drill Hall, Whitney Museum, Brooklyn Museum, MoMAPS, New Orleans Museum of Art, Centre Georges Pompidou, Hayward Gallery, CA2M Centro de Arte dos de Mayo, and Garage Center for Contemporary Culture. Recent awards for his work include the 2022 Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica Award; the 2022 NEWFEST Emerging Black LGBTQ+ Filmmaker Award; 2022 Bessie Award; 2020/2021 Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence artist residency; 2019 LACMA Art + Technology Lab Grant; and a 2017 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.

Johnny Symons is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker specializing in LGBTQ documentaries. His film Daddy & Papa was nominated for the Sundance Grand Jury Prize, broadcast in more than a dozen countries and garnered 12 festival awards. His other feature documentaries include Out Run, which premiered at Full Frame and aired on PBS, and Ask Not, which won multiple festival awards and screened for the US Congress on Capitol Hill. He is co-producer of the Academy Award-nominated Long Night’s Journey into Day, which won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize, and executive producer of Pray Away, which premiered at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival and is streaming on Netflix. Symons’ work has screened at more than 200 international film festivals and is used by hundreds of college educators and community organizers. He graduated with honors from Brown University and has a master’s in documentary production from Stanford. He is an Associate Professor, Coordinator of the MFA Program and Director of Queer Cinema Project at San Francisco State University’s School of Cinema. Symons has been a Fellow in the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program and Co-Chair of the Steering Committee at New Day Films.

We are filming a few remaining scenes to combine with the many hours of amazing footage captured over the past few years, including at Assembly 2022 in NYC. Your contributions are critical to allow us to pay for production crew, editing and post-production costs and equipment. Thank you!