La MaMa’s Squirts – June 6-8

BIOS

Paris Alexander – (they/them) the curator and art director of La MaMa’s SQUIRTS since 2020- is a black/white American (West African by way of the Atlantic Slave Trade and Scotch Irish) multidisciplinary performance artist and producer with emphases in the experimental, creating visual landscapes/world building, storytelling, homage, invocation, and cross-pollinating.
June 2025 marks their 10 year anniversary of living and working as an artist of many forms in Brooklyn and downtown NYC.
They have operated as a visual artist, actor, playwright, stand up comic, and drag artist- with all named mediums deemed by their peers as “performance art.”
Their work often explores retrofuturism and means of calling forth queer ancestry and their matriarchal lineage.
They are an avid lover and researcher of B-sides, music sample origins, queer artists and untold legacies.
Since 2021 they have hosted and produced an all black experimental drag variety show with Julie J and Voxigma Lo at Purgatory, BK called Sylvester- named after the eponymous disco legend and Cockette.
Some of their favorite projects: with Jeremy O. Harris (“Watersports”/Insignificant White Boys”, BOFFO 2019), Jeff Weiss (“And That’s How The Rent Gets Paid” revival, The Kitchen, 2015), Charlotte Brathwaite (“No More Water, The Fire Next Time”, Park Avenue Armory), MTHR TRSA’s “Hole Pics” Sophie tribute shows- 2024 + 2025, BLACKLIPS QUENCHED, at SQUIRTS 2023- in collaboration with The Haus of Quench and former members of The Blacklips Performance Cult, an archival research of Hattie Hathaway’s work at HOWL, commissioned by Visual AIDS in collaboration with Buffy Sierra, performed as an interpolated homage at the VAVA Awards in 2024, and “With You in Spirit” an installation of artifacts and ephemera by their late mother and grandmother, exhibited by Forest For Trees Collective on Governor’s Island.
Their plays have been presented at Ars Nova, The Wild Project, Dixon Place, and La MaMa Galleria.
They have had art residencies on Governor’s Island, at Movement Research, and La MaMa Umbria in Italy.
They have been in fellowships by Clubbed Thumb, NYCQT, and the Performance Project at University Settlement.
One of their favorite reviews comes from Deepali Gupta:
“Paris speaks with the dead.”

ABYSS X Evangelia VS aka Abyss X is an artist, composer, songstress, director, choreographer, creative director and curator from Crete with an academic background in computer science and the performing arts, including a Central St Martins MA. She has released albums on acclaimed music labels AD 93, Halcyon Veil and Danse Noire and her music has appeared in fashion for the likes of Mugler, Luis de Javier, Anna Bolina, Julius and more. Former and ongoing collaborators include Grammy-nominated producers Rabit and SOPHIE, Chinese-American filmmaker and visual artist Andrew Thomas Huang, New York artist and writer Juliana Huxtable and visual artist and lighting designer Theresa Baumgartner. Evangelia VS has contributed choreography, movement direction and video design to theatre productions by the Athens and Epidaurus Festival, the National Theatre of Greece, the Mediterranean Biennale and more. Her personal cross-disciplinary work traverses a range of themes including the feminine body, eco-grief, surveillance, monetization of the feminine, the erotic, and post internet life. She has performed and toured her work in Europe, Mexico, USA, Asia and Australia at numerous festivals, art and music spaces including National Sawdust, Tanzquartier Wien, Performance Space New York, Phoenix Central Park, 3537org, La Gaité Lyrique, ICA Miami, Miami Art Basel, Southbank Centre (Royal Festival Hall, Purcell Room), La Casa Encendida, Vooruit, the Biennale of Moving Image (Geneva), Small Epidaurus Theatre, HAU2, DOKUFEST, MONOM (Funkhaus), Wysing Arts Centre, Tai Kwun (Hong Kong), Inkonst and more. Evangelia VS is also the founder and curator of Nature Loves Courage Festival taking place in Crete since 2019

GARRETT ALLEN is an artist and director currently residing in Brooklyn, NY. They primarily work through live performance and experiences. Garrett has shown, shared, and directed work with the School of Drama at Yale, Ars Nova, Prelude Festival, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Knockdown Center, Public Assistants, Yale Dramat, The Invisible Dog, Laguardia Performing Arts Center, Jupiter Disco, Spectrum NYC, School for Visual Arts NY, NXTHVN, University for the Arts Philadelphia, and more. www.garrett-allen.com

Joey Arias is a Downtown star; performance artist, singer, and drag icon whose career spans music, theater, and cabaret. Rising to fame in the 1980s New York avant-garde scene, Arias performed alongside David Bowie with his love Klaus Nomi on Saturday Night Live singing Boys Keep Swinging and TVC15.
He has had longstanding collaborations with Sherry Vine, Jackie Beat and Raven O At Bar d’O.
With a signature blend of jazz vocals, sharp wit, and daring theatricality, Arias has captivated audiences at venues like Carnegie Hall, Joe’s Pub, and the Soho Theatre in London. Notable works include Arias With a Twist, a surreal collaboration with puppeteer Basil Twist, and his long-running Las Vegas show Zumanity with Cirque du Soleil. Film credits include Elvira, Mistress of the Dark and To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar. Arias is most known for embodying and channeling the vocal stylings and essence of Billie Holiday- performing her songs at Lincoln Center- adorned in her clothes and jewelry for her centennial celebration. Arias recently released a short film directed by Aaron Maurer with the accompanying singles “Ooh What A Feeling/No One Knows/Whatever” and the album that features them: PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE- on Beige Records. A transcendant innovator, Joey Arias continues to dazzle and mesmerize with performances that defy genre.

Photo by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders for Paper Magazine

Tyler Ashley is a Dance, Drag and Performance Artist. Ashley has performed for Elizabeth Streb, DANCENOISE, Larissa Velez-Jackson, Sean Donovan, Katy Pyle, and Charles Atlas among others. She is also known as The Dauphine – a nightlife personality, performer, producer, and emcee. Her dance art and/or drag performances have been presented by Performa, The High Line, Times Square Alliance, NADA, BOFFO, and seen at Brooklyn Museum, Bard College, Art Basel, BAM, FIAR, The Kitchen, MANA, New York Live Arts, The Public Theater, Jacob’s Pillow, Triskelion Arts, Knockdown Center, The Chocolate Factory, Movement Research, Danspace Project and more.

Photo by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

Cynthia Carr is the author, most recently, of Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar, winner of the National Book Critics Award for biography. Her previous books are Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz, winner of a Lambda Literary Award and finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize; Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America; and On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century. Once a staff writer at The Village Voice (using the byline C.Carr), her work has also appeared in Artforum, The New York Times, TDR:The Drama Review, and other publications.

God Complex (also known as Aeon Andreas) is a transexual, transdisciplinary director and performer working in the fields of drag, theater, film, and dance. Both in and out of drag, God Complex crafts wild, glittering, pseudo-mystical, atmospheric landscapes about transgender euphoria and joy through the collision of genre and form. Aeon is a member of the dance-theater company Witness Relocation, the sideshow theater company, The No Ring Circus, and he is a resident artist at the nightclub House of Yes. He has performed across the world as a dance artist and drag performer in iconic places such as Lincoln Center, BAM, The Chelsea Hotel, LaMama, Bonnaroo Arts festival, New Orleans’ Civic Theater, Detroit’s Masonic Temple, the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theater, and Berlin’s Mahalla. Aeon taught contact improv, composition, choreography, and drag practicums at Tisch Drama’s Playwrights Horizons Theater School for eight years, and has guest taught at colleges like MIT and Montclair State University. His dance-theater work has been shown at TV Eye, Center for Performance Research, Greenwood Cemetery, God Complex’s work straddles drag and performance art and often centers his transexual body in conversation with “the void,” whatever that may mean. He is a warped reflection of his host body’s reality. IG: @g0d.c0mplex.

A New Jersey native and long-time figure in New York’s downtown scene, Lola Flash is an activist documenting themes of race, age, and gender. Flash was an active ACT UP member during the AIDS epidemic in New York City and featured in the 1989 “Kissing Doesn’t Kill” poster. Their art and activism are deeply connected, fueling a life-long commitment to visibility and preserving the legacy of LGBTQIA+ and communities of color.
Flash works primarily in portraiture with a 4×5 film camera and a digital medium format camera, engaging those often deemed invisible. With numerous international exhibitions and commissions, their work is included in collections such as MoMA, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the George Eastman Museum. Flash is also a Kamoinge Collective member and President of the Queer Art board.
A committed artist, Flash uses photography to provide “new ways of seeing.” They create visually alluring images while initiating change and progress. Their work invites viewers to not only look but see.

Photo by Travis Sherwood

Heather Glynis is a writer, performer, and all around transsexual-about-town. She is interested in the ways sex and celebrity both free and confine us, the asymptotic friction of trans identity, jokes, Language poetry, and apocalypse as an opportunity for a vaudevillian coming together. She approaches her work through the lens of a poet, but sees poetry not as an end, but an engine for something more expansive that can integrate drag, narrative, music, and performance into an alternative mosaic theater — though she does occasionally just write poems. She’s written and performed for The Poetry Project, Wonder Press, No, Dear, Parkside Lounge, La Mama, and more. She is from fair Verona, New Jersey and lives in Bushwick.

Kay Gabriel is a writer and organizer. She’s the author of A Queen in Bucks County and Kissing Other People or the House of Fame, and the co-editor of We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, all from Nightboat. Kay is the editorial director at the Poetry Project, where she edits the Poetry Project Newsletter. Her next book, Perverts, is forthcoming from Nightboat in fall 2025.

Photo: Ryan McGinley

Slant Rhyme (b.1996) is a research-based artist and anti-disciplinary writer and performer from Southern Louisiana. Their work explores posthumous poetics, object orientations, non-hierarchical systems of interconnectedness, and the body as a site to critique violence within the built environment and the black imaginary. Their words have been featured in Spike Art Magazine, The Whitney Review of New Writing, Writing on Raving, and Transgender Studies Quarterly. They have been commissioned by the Idea Fund, Trans Justice Funding Project, and received support from the The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts, UNO gallery and the Blaffer Museum.

RuAfza (b. Siddhant Talwar) is a multidisciplinary artist and designer based in Brooklyn, specializing in drag performance and visual arts. As a queer immigrant from India, their work explores themes of gender, immigration, and consumption through lenticular imagery and immersive installations.
Their practice balances artistic innovation with accessibility, creating emotionally resonant work that combines humor with introspection. Drawing from community organizing and labor union collaborations in India, RuAfza has performed at the Paramount Theater in Boston and The Flea in NYC, and held workshops and participated in panels at Tufts, Yale, SFSU, Northeastern, and Williams College about performance and collective resistance.
RuAfza holds a BFA in Studio Art and BA in New Media from Tufts University, graduating Magna cum Laude with thesis honors. 
She has produced shows at 3 Dollar Bill, C’mon Everybody, Herbert Von King Cultural Center and more.

Photo by Lola Flash

VaLeria  is a trans multidisciplinary artist born and raised in the Philippines. Their work explores the intersections of sexuality, race, gender, and spirituality, investigating the role of spiritual traditions in family and broader cultural relationships. They emphasize the theatricality and psychological impact of these traditions, drawing upon a deep appreciation for Pilipino culture and an avant-garde trans creative energy.

Honoring ancestral, trans, two-spirit, and siya heritage, Valeria’s work fuses traditional techniques with influences from the Tausug Region and Ballroom-vogue scenes. Through their artistry, they push the boundaries of trans visibility, fashion innovation, and performance.