Horizons - Our Stories of Resistance and Healing - Shawna Virago
Channel: Archive Productions
Date: 2018-08-23

July 10, 2018 New Conservatory Theatre
Q Series 2018

Queer Art: Our Stories of Resistance and Healing 
Queer Art has always told a deep narrative of our LGBTQ community. Throughout modern history it has told intricate tales of our struggles, our resistance, and our healing. Today, queer art and artists play a prominent role in our larger culture but in the process, has it lost its identity? At our free Q Series event, our distinguished panelists will be discussing how queer art fuels the resistance and whether, by taking up space in nontraditional areas, it still yields the same effects that it has in the past?

Shawna Virago, Artistic Director of San Francisco Transgender Film Festival‎

Virago has been the San Francisco Transgender Film Festival’s Artistic Director since 2003, selecting the films and videos, organizing fundraising, coordinating production staff and volunteers and overseeing publicity. Virago’s own original films have screened at festivals throughout the world including Frameline (San Francisco); OutFest (Los Angeles); New Fest (NYC); Netherlands Film Festival; London Transgender Film Festival; MIX Fest (NYC); Toronto Transgender Film Festival. Virago is a published writer and her most recent work appears in Gender Outlaws: Next Generation and in Trans/Love: Radical Sex, Love & Relationships Beyond the Gender Binary. She is featured in the documentaries Diagnosing Difference and The Believers. 

Virago has been an LGBT anti-violence activist for over 15 years. She was the first transgender woman to serve on the board of directors of San Francisco Women Against Rape. She was on the Transgender Law Center Board and the Transgender Gender-Variant Justice Project Advisory Board. She is a founding member of TransAction, a pioneering police accountability group and for 13 years was the Domestic Violence Program Director at Community United Against Violence. She is the first transgender woman ever chosen to be a San Francisco Pride Grand Marshal and served on San Francisco’s pioneering Transgender Human Rights Task Force.