Screening + Conversation: Drag, Kinship, and Mourning

In conjunction with Across the Universe, join TUAG in collaboration with the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies for an interactive screening and conversation with exhibiting artist Tomashi Jackson, Associate Professor Kareem Khubchandani (LaWhore Vagistan), and two special guests — multidisciplinary performer and director of opera and theater Alexander Gedeon from the LA Philharmonic and Rebecca Uchill, Professor of the Practice and Director of the Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture (CADVC), a research center and art gallery at the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at UMBC. Featuring One Night Only with Tommy Tonight, a rare live performance of Jackson as Tommy Tonight lip-syncing the Doobie Brothers with a soundtrack directed by Gedeon, the event will discuss the ways drag and kinship are linked, through intergenerational support, grief, and memory, and how the participants’ artistic practices allow them to mourn and process loss.  

This program is supported by the Tufts AS&E Diversity Fund.

Kareem Khubchandani (any pronouns) is Associate Professor of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies at Tufts University. He is the author of Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife (University of Michigan Press, 2020), which received the 2019 CLAGS: Center for LGBTQ Studies Fellowship award, the 2021 Dance Studies Association de la Torre Bueno Best Book Award, and the 2021 ATHE Outstanding Book Award. Kareem is co-editor of Queer Nightlife (University of Michigan Press) and curator of www.criticalauntystudies.com. He holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University, and previously served as Embrey Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. 

An educator, scholar, and performer, Khubchandani is invested in feminist, queer, and trans everyday aesthetics, particularly in South Asia and its diaspora. Their work is committed to uplifting the creative ways that minoritarian subjects live inside of oppressive structures, especially how we use dance, fashion, and language to build something more beautiful for each other.

 Alexander Gedeon is a director of opera, music-theater, and music video born in Los Angeles and based in New York City. His work spans the divide between pop and classical, fusing dreamlike abstraction and a passion for slapstick. Over the past seven years, Alexander has worked at the cutting edge of new American opera and theater alongside multiple Pulitzer Prize, MacArthur Genius Fellowship, and Grammy award-winning artists. Most recently, his production of Everything Rises at the Brooklyn Academy of Music was celebrated as a New York Times Critic’s Pick. Previous productions have been acclaimed as “provocative, visually stunning” and “a perfect, experimental approach to opera." Alexander has guest directed at San Francisco Conservatory of Music, New York University and guest lectured at Harvard University. As a regular associate to iconic opera director Yuval Sharon, he has been a part of developing new productions of works by John Cage, Richard Wagner, and Anna Deavere Smith at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Detroit Opera, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Alexander graduated summa cum laude from New York University (Experimental Theatre Wing) and trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London.  

Tomashi Jackson (born 1980 in Houston, Texas) was raised in Los Angeles, California. She received her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale School of Art in 2016, her Master of Science in Art, Culture, and Technology from the MIT School of Architecture and Planning in 2012, and her BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 2010. Jackson’s work has been included in recent solo exhibitions at the MCA, Denver, ICA Philadelphia, Parrish Art Museum, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the Wexner Center for the Arts. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions including Going Dark: the Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility (2023) and Off the Record at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2021), the 2021 Texas Biennial: A New Landscape, A Possible Horizon, the 2019 Whitney Biennial, Hinge Pictures: Eight Women Artists Occupy the Third Dimension (2019) at Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans and In the Abstract at MASS MoCA (2017). Jackson’s artworks are in numerous museum collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Pérez Art Museum Miami. Jackson lives and works in Cambridge, MA, and New York City.

Rebecca Uchill is Professor of the Practice and Director of the Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture (CADVC), a research center and art gallery at the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at UMBC. As a curator, she is invested in facilitating exploratory research inquiries and expanding the genres of exhibitionary formats. She is currently working with Tomashi Jackson on an interdisciplinary publication focused on historical disinvestment in the arts and humanities. She contributed an interview with Tomashi Jackson on the theme of lip-synching to the Neuberger Museum of Art book Slow Jamz (2022) and previously worked with Jackson (and collaborators) as curator/artist for the Experience Economies event series. 

Image: Still from Tomashi Jackson: "One Night Only with Tommy Tonight,” Directed by Alexander Gedeon. Courtesy of Night Gallery.