Archives Onstage and the LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project are collaborating to create a working group for artists, scholars and archivists who are interested in and working on questions of archiving queer performance. If you’re interested in joining the working group, fill out this form and we’ll be in touch with news of spring events.
ABOUT THE LGBTQ+ ARTISTS ARCHIVE PROJECT
This project is an initiative led by 11 LGBTQ+ downtown NYC artists who have had an indelible impact on New York City’s and the national culture over the past 50+ years, They are Five Lesbian Brothers (5-member collective Moe Angelos, Babs Davy, Dominique Dibbell, Peg Healey, Lisa Kron), Ain Gordon, Ishmael Houston-Jones, John Kelly, Richard Move, Lola Pashalinski, and Carmelita Tropicana; together they form a multi-faceted perspective on a rich and highly influential era, one that blossomed during what some regard as the last gasp of physical bohemia–which later coincided with the AIDS epidemic that devastated their generation’s collective voice. Project Co-Directors: Linda S. Chapman and Alyce Dissette.
Learn more here.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Ain Gordon is a three-time Obie Award-winning writer/director/actor, Creative Capital awardee, and a Guggenheim Fellow. Gordon’s work often frames marginalized/forgotten history. Next up Gordon premieres “Condolence” at New York Live Arts December 2026. Recent projects: “Relics and Their Humans” with Josh Quillen, tributing an Ohio couple navigating ALS, at Krannert (IL), Wexner (OH), Arizona Arts Live, La MaMa (NY), CAP UCLA, Quick Center (CT), and Utah Presents; “Radicals In Miniature” with Quillen, collected requiems for personal icons at Baryshnikov Arts (NY); Festival of Arts & Ideas, Connecticut College (CT); Williams College and The Yard (both MA); “217 Boxes Of Dr. Henry Anonymous” at Painted Bride (PA), Baryshnikov Arts (NY), Transylvania University (KY), and CAP UCLA. Pick Up Performance Co Director since 1992.
Ishmael Houston-Jones is a choreographer, author, performer, teacher, and curator. His improvised dance and text work has been performed world-wide. He has received three Bessie New York Dance and Performance Awards for collaborations with writer Dennis Cooper, choreographers Miguel Gutierrez and Fred Holland, and composers Chris Cochrane and Nick Hallett. Houston-Jones curated Platform 2012: Parallels and co-curated with Will Rawls Platform 2016: Lost & Found, Dance, New York, HIV/AIDS, Then and Now, both at Danspace Project. Houston-Jones’ work has been supported by The Herb Alpert Foundation, The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
John Kelly is an award-winning choreographer, vocalist, and visual artist. His character driven performance works dramatize the lives of cultural outsiders, and the realities they navigate. Subjects have included gay persecution, tattoo culture, the Berlin Wall, the AIDS pandemic, Mythology, Expressionistic Film, and works based on Egon Schiele, Caravaggio, Antonin Artaud, Joni Mitchell, and Jean Cocteau. His visual art is based in self-portraiture, including drawing, painting, and video. His graphic memoir A Friend Gave Me A Book was exhibited at PPOW gallery this past February. He recently portrayed outside artist Henry Darger in collaboration with Martha Clarke in Bughouse at the Vineyard Theatre.
Richard Move, PhD, MFA, is a Guggenheim Fellow, TED Global Oxford Fellow, NYPL Dance Research Fellow, Associate Arts Professor at NYU Tisch/Dance and Artistic Director of MoveOpolis! Move serves as Advisor for Choreographic Interpretation and Immersive Experience to Australian artist-astronaut Sarah Jane Pell, creatively interpreting data gathered during Pell’s upcoming aerospace mission. Move’s Herstory of the Universe@Governors Island was named in The New York Times’ “Best Dance of 2021.” Martha@…, their performance as Martha Graham, received two Bessie Awards and was presented by BAM’s Next Wave Festival in 2025. Move’s films include Bardo, Bloodwork – The Ana Mendieta Story, and Ghostlight.
Lola Pashalinski is a founding member of The Ridiculous Theatrical Company with writer/director Charles Ludlam, creating 17 roles in 13 years, receiving two Obie awards for that work. Leaving The Ridiculous in 1980, Lola worked extensively off-Broadway and regionally in productions with Lee Breuer, Richard Foreman, JoAnne Akalaitis, Les Waters, Anne Bogart, David Gordon, Ain Gordon, Neil Bartlett, and others. Co-writing and performing Gertrude and Alice: A Likeness to Loving, she received her third Obie. Lola made her Broadway debut in Fortune’s Fool with the late Alan Bates. She has appeared in many films and on television, including Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close directed by Stephen Daldry. Carmelita Tropicana (aka Alina Troyano) is a writer and performer based in New York and the recipient of the 2026 Obie Award for Lifetime Achievement. Her recent theater productions include Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! (2024), a collaboration with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins produced by Soho Rep. She was a featured actor in Galas a play by Charles Ludlum with opera singer Anthony Roth Costanzo produced at Little Island (2025). Select awards and fellowships include the LatinX Artist Fellowship (2022), John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2017), MacDowell Fellowships (2025-2016) and a Creative Capital award (2016). Her plays have appeared in numerous publications and her book I, Carmelita Tropicana- Performing Between Cultures a compilation of scripts, essays and short stories was published by Beacon Press. Her upcoming projects include a theater piece titled Live Memoir. You can listen to her podcast That’s Not What Happened on Soundcloud.
For over 30 years, the Five Lesbian Brothers have created provocative lesbian theater for the masses using the fine feminist art of collaboration. Consisting of Moe Angelos, Babs Davy, Dominique Dibbell, Peg Healey, and Lisa Kron, the Brothers emerged from the bosom of the WOW Café Theater in 1989. In their performing heyday, they appeared regularly in off- and off-off-Broadway theaters such as New York Theatre Workshop, The Public Theater, PS 122, Dixon Place, and La MaMa. They also extensively toured the glorious queer and queer-friendly theater and performance circuit that flourished in the late 90s, garnering Obie and Bessie Awards, a GLAAD Media Award, and countless participation trophies.
Linda S. Chapman, Co-Director of the LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project, is Founding President of Youth Arts New York. A current member of the Board of the Pick Up Performance Company, she retired in 2020 as Associate Artistic Director of New York Theatre Workshop where she served as an instrumental curator, advocate, and collaborator for 26 years. Prior to NYTW, she was Managing Director of The Wooster Group and a co-producer of DYKE TV, a grassroots public access program, made by and for the lesbian community. A Lilly Award and Prelude ’23 Frankie Award winner, she is co-writer and performer of the Obie Award-winning Gertrude and Alice: A Likeness to Loving with her life partner of 46 years Lola Pashalinski, directed by Anne Bogart. She co-adapted Ann Bannon’s lesbian classic The Beebo Brinker Chronicles for the stage with playwright Kate Moira Ryan. The play was awarded a GLAAD Media Award and nominated for a Lambda Literary Award
Alyce Dissette, Co-Director of the LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project, is a producer for performing, visual, film, and digital artists who has worked in a wide range of venues and projects from staff member in the Metropolitan Opera Presentations Department to former Executive Producer of the PBS national series, “Alive from Off Center”, and on digital media productions with the Voyager Co. She has worked with hundreds of artists including filmmakers Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, François Girard, visual artist James Turrell, author Art Spiegelman, and in the performing arts, Sir Richard Alston, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Karin Coonrod, Ain Gordon, David Gordon, Philip Glass, Nona Hendryx, John Kelly, Urban Bush Women, Brenda Way, Robert Wilson, and Arthur Yorinks. She has served on the Board of Directors for Dance/USA and the Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York. She produced the multi-faceted archive project for director/choreographer/writer David Gordon that is considered a model in the field. She is the Producing Director for the Pick Up Performance Co.
Pick Up Performance Co., incorporated in 1978, is an artist-driven development, production, and presenting organization founded by choreographer/director/writer David Gordon. In 1992, the Pick Up Performance Co. (PUPC) expanded its artistic leadership to support the work of writer/director Ain Gordon, his son, who now helms the company. Since 1978, PUPC has produced over 100 performance works through multi-year production/ development models in partnership with leading performance venues, community organizations and universities, including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, Baryshnikov Arts, New York Live Arts, 651 Arts, and La MaMa ETC (all NYC); Krannert Center for the Performing Arts (IL), Arizona Arts Live, UCLA Center for the Art of Performance, William Way LGBT Community Center (PA), the Mark Taper Forum (CA), International Festival of Arts & Ideas (CT), National Performance Network, and Williams College (MA), to cite a few.
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