Kevin Seaman is an artist, curator and consultant based in San Francisco. Influenced by the city’s rich drag culture and history of queer provocation, Seaman creates community-engaged interdisciplinary performance and digital media exploring contemporary queer experiences at the intersection of gender and sexuality. Seaman is currently working on the interdisciplinary theatrical performance #femmasculine investigating gender’s relationship to gay male sexuality and toxic masculinity’s dissonant role in American culture.

Kwanele Finch Thusi is a senior lecturer in Drama For Life at Wit University, Johannesburg. He has worked with students since 2009 by teaching dance and performance studies. During the festival Finch will host a workshop and show an exert of his dance piece PINA, a three year research journey about silence – the silencing of black expressionism because of history and genetic psychology. PINA places Black expressionism in the forefront. Multidisciplinary in nature, the work lives in gallery, museum, site and theatre spaces since 2015.

”In Sesotho, the term PINA means „song‟ and as such the work helps us to trace back into knowledge about the perceptions of the black queer body, showing how these bodies have been conceived through colonist frames and thus re constructed to generate knowledge about the contemporary black queer body which dis-places away from positions of mistrust, fear, and anxiety. It extends the conversation about these prehistoric implications and asks for a revision that requires a rigorous inquiry into our current practices in the teaching of black expressionism, as well as in our scholarship. PINA further explores the subtext that has been carried in our discussions about “black queer body,” that, like rhetoric, the “black queer body” is always an exotic object, which has not become abstracted over time due to continual colonial practice.”