Queer|Art, NYC’s home for the creative and professional development of LGBTQ+ artists, reopens applications for two national grants. They are the Illuminations Grant for Black Trans Women isual Artists, and the Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant.
The 2025 Queer|Art Illuminations Grant judges include curator & writer Legacy Russell, community organizer, arts advocate. Also, producer Jordyn Jay, and interdisciplinary artist & independent curator Lee Laa Ray Guillory. Now in its fifth year, The Illuminations Grant sheds light on the under-recognized contributions of Black trans women visual artists. It provides critical support to their continuing work. This grant was developed and named in partnership with Mariette Pathy Allen, Aaryn Lang, and Serena Jara. It supports visual artists who are self-identified Black trans women. It awards $10,000 to the winner and $1,250 to distinguished finalists. Learn more about the Illuminations Grant and meet the founding team at www.queer-art.org/illuminations-grant.
The 2025 Barbara Hammer Grant judges include interdisciplinary artist A.K. Burns, director, producer, and writer Cheryl Dunye, and interdisciplinary filmmaker Ela Troyano. Now in its seventh year, the Barbara Hammer Grant awards a grant to self-identified lesbians for making visionary moving-image art. The Barbara Hammer Grant directly supports with funds provided by the estate of legendary lesbian experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer (1939-2019). It includes an award of $5,000, and a series of individual studio visits with QA staff members. It also supports the grant’s judges in the winner’s creative and professional development. Learn more about the Barbara Hammer Grant at www.queer-art.org/hammer-grant.
Applications for both Queer|Art grants are open from March 31st, 2025 through July 2nd, 2025. Prospective applicants should review application requirements and apply directly through the Queer|Art website.
About the 2025 Illuminations Grant Judges
Legacy Russell
Legacy Russell is a curator and writer. Born and raised in New York City, and she is the Executive Director & Chief Curator of The Kitchen. Her academic, curatorial, and creative work focuses on gender, performance, digital selfdom, internet idolatry, and new media ritual. She is the recipient of the Thoma Foundation 2019 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art. Additionally, a 2020 Rauschenberg Residency Fellow, a recipient of the 2021 Creative Capital Award. As well as a 2022 Pompeii Commitment Digital Fellow. Finallay, a 2023 Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellow, and a 2024-25 Lunder Institute for American Art Fellow. Her first book is Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020). Her second book is BLACK MEME (2024).
Jordyn Jay
Originally from Jacksonville, FL, Jordyn Jay (she/her) is a community organizer, arts advocate, and producer based in Brooklyn, NY. She is the Founder and Executive Director of the Black Trans Femmes in the Arts Collective (BTFA). Before founding BTFA, Jordyn received her Master’s degree in Art Politics from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Jordyn is a firm believer in the power of art to inspire radical sociopolitical change. She uses that power for Black trans liberation.
Lee Laa Ray Guillory
Lee Laa Ray Guillory is a New Orleans-based interdisciplinary artist and independent curator. Her work is devoted to Black mysticism and photographic investigation of intersectional identity. Guillory inherited rituals of hair maintenance, oral mythologies, and alternative photographic practices, serving as the foundational elements of her work. Louisiana’s religious history of European, Indigenous, and Afro-diasporic spiritual syncretization incites her multi-faceted art making practice. Lee Laa Ray Guillory’s interdisciplinary practice follows the tradition of art as ritual. Her past works offer divination to the Mississippi River watershed, ancestral veneration via self portraiture, immersive photo-based installations, and spirit led photography.
About the 2025 Barbara Hammer Grant Judges
A.K. Burns
A.K. Burns is an interdisciplinary artist and associate professor in the Department of Art at Hunter College, City University of New York.
Using video, installation, sculpture, drawing, and collaboration and working at the nexus of language and materiality, she/they trouble systems that assign value and explore their sociopolitical embodiment.
Burns has exhibited internationally, including at 2018’s FRONT International, Cleveland, Ohio; the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Julia Stoschek Foundation, Dusseldorf, Germany; MMK Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt am Main, Germany; New Museum, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, Oregon; and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio.
She/they was a founding member of W.A.G.E. (Working Artists in the Greater Economy), a nonprofit artists’ advocacy group. Community Action Center (2010), a video made in collaboration with A.L. Steiner, which re-imagines pornographic cinema for queer womxn, and trans and nonbinary bodies, and has screened internationally, including the Tate, London; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Burns is a 2023 Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin; a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow; a 2016 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; and a 2015 Creative Capital Foundation Visual Arts Award Recipient.
Cheryl Dunye
Cheryl Dunye is a Liberian-American director, producer, and writer who emerged as part of the “queer new wave”of young filmmakers of the 1990s.
All in all, she has made over 15 films, including MOMMY IS COMING, THE OWLS, MY BABY’S DADDY, and HBO’s STRANGER INSIDE, which garnered her an Independent Spirit award nomination for best director. Her feature film, THE WATERMELON WOMAN (1996), won the Teddy Award for Best Feature at the 1996 Berlin International Film Festival and was recently restored by Outfest’s UCLA Legacy Project for the film’s 20th anniversary. In 2015, Dunye’s multi-award-winning short film, BLACK IS BLUE (2014), was named one of the top five “Must See Feminist Films” by IndieWire.
Dunye has directed many episodic series, including Ava Duvernay’s Queen Sugar, Dear White People, Bridgerton, and Lovecraft Country, for which her “Strange Case” episode received a 52nd NAACP Image Award nomination for Outstanding Directing in a Drama Series and has been named one of the best episodes in 2020 by The Hollywood Reporter and Entertainment Tonight. In 2018, she launched her Oakland-based production company called JINGLETOWN FILMS, which is actively developing — THE GILDA STORIES, an adaptation of the beloved 1991 queer vampire novel by Jewelle Gomez, and the feature-length version of her award-winning short, BLACK IS BLUE.
Ela Troyano
Ela Troyano is an interdisciplinary filmmaker, born in Cuba and based in New York City. Her projects bring together different aesthetic histories and genres: downtown New York avant-garde film and performance, queer cinema, Cuban-American cinema-in-exile and Latina film and video. Troyano’s work explores the connections between performance and film through the lens of guerrilla practice: camouflage and insurrection conceptually shape both the form and content of her work. Her performance based projects blur the line between installation and live action, while her experimental filmmaking troubles the traditional relationships of documentation and distribution.
About Queer|Art
Queer|Art connects and empowers LGBTQ+ artists across generations and creative disciplines. Founded in 2009, we are an artist-led and community-centered organization—united by shared values of collective care, creative resilience, and the preservation and advancement of queer legacies and queer futures.
The devastating loss of a generation of artists to the ongoing AIDS pandemic has created a profound longing for cross-generational connections, mentorship, and community. Queer|Art serves as a ballast against this loss, seeking to highlight and address a continuing fundamental lack of both economic and institutional support for our community.
Ongoing programmatic initiatives include: our annual cornerstone program, the year-long Queer|Art|Mentorship and a wide array of awards, grants, and offerings that provide direct support to LGBTQ+ artists.
Website: www.queer-art.org
Instagram: @queerart