Workshop Description: BQE is back this spring 2024 with a new artist workshop series. Featuring the creative and scholarly talents of local Black queer artists, we hope to create spaces for students to self reflect through dance, fashion, and writing. 

The first workshop, led by Michelé Prince, is entitled Black Futures in (E)Motion. In this workshop, participants will engage with the questions:

• What is to come for Black queer peoples?

• How might this future feel?

Using critical, historical, poetic, and speculative texts and sounds as our shared point of departure, participants will co-generate movement, gesture, and dance that explores the questions of black futurity, embodiment, and elsewhere/otherwise for black queer "bodies."

The second workshop, led by Rich the Rocket, is entitled The Signature: Understanding and Defining Personal Style. Participants will have the opportunity to be in interactive workshop on expressing your personal style. Rich’s fashion designs incorporate all bodies, all genders, and all sizes. Together, he and the participants will explore how our clothing can allow for freedom of gender expression.

Meet the Artists

Michelé Prince (they/them) is a scholar, writer, choreographer, and collaborative cultural producer. They are a nonbinary hybrid of a person brought up girl and born, raised, and reppin’ Jamaica, WI and South Central LA and now live, very happily, in the DMV. They are activated by the intersections of desire, power, fluidity, and the fantastic. 

Fascinated with utilizing the lens of race, class, gender, and sexuality to study power. Michelé has spent the last 12+ years studying the creation and maintenance of hierarchies, the roots of oppression, and the stifling of difference. Their research and creative interests center masculine of center cultural production, womxn of color speculative thought, movement and dance, storytelling, and mythmaking praxis. And, all things critical race. 

They are interested in utilizing the gift of storytelling and the tools of mythmaking, revision, and speculation in order to visualize elsewhere(s) and practices for otherwise—especially for Black and queer people—children and adult. Dancemaking, movement direction, and collaborative art practice is a large part of their mental health regime and worldmaking process.

Michelé holds a Master’s degree from the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality from the University of Maryland, College Park and a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science and Women’s Studies from the University of Washington.

Rich the Rocket (he/him) is creator and fashion designer for Vintage Threads.

The only thing that stands between success and failure, is risk, and Rich Rocket is a risk taker! A born creator, Rich has mastered the art of spinning gold from yarn! A Visual Savant, Story Teller, Event Provocateur, Curator, and most importantly no stranger expressing his personal style. Rich started Vintage Thrivals in 2018. An innovative Vintage clothing company that turns sustainably sourced clothing into 1 on 1 wearable art! Our brand aims to celebrate ALL BODIES! All shapes, sizes, and presentations, while also helping to put an end to the waste created by fast fashion!