LGBTQ+ non-profit GLAAD presents a new cohort of their Equity in Media and Entertainment Initiative (EMEI), an annual programme dedicated to uplifting queer artists of colour based in the US. The final twenty unveils an entire spectrum of themes and techniques, from drawing through woodwork to video – all in testament to the multiplicity of the artists’ lived experience and intersectional identity.
EMEI expands upon GLAAD’s decade-long mission of ensuring fair and inclusive queer representation. Started in 2022, the programme strives to illuminate different genres of Black LGBTQ+ creativity, addressing the historic inequalities that limited their presence in entertainment. Powered by Gilead Sciences, the programme offers artists year-long financial and developmental support under the supervision of Mickalene Thomas, an internationally renowned African-American artist.
While previous years have given space to emerging Black filmmakers and independent musicians, the 2025 edition of EMEI highlights some of the most fascinating Black queer visual artists living in the United States. Here are the ten creatives that stood out to us, exploring all the different ways in which visual art can make marginalised lives visible.
Anthony Badon (BE3K)
Known professionally as BE3K, Anthony Badon is an artist creating across drawing and painting, based in New Orleans, Louisiana. His canvases, rooted in Black figurative art, present a meditation on the culture of the African American diaspora – the nostalgic and the contemporary. Among his recent projects, for one, is a series of paintings embracing the Cowboy culture. Drawing inspiration both from personal and communal histories, Badon combines storytelling with visual expression to honour his identity. “A huge part of my mission as an artist is to celebrate the power of my blackness. All the things about us we were taught to suppress in order to be digestible for others are the very things I aim to highlight”, he states.
Badon sees his art as akin to a dream – sometimes finished, sometimes left without a resolution. In his practice, he centres emotion and motion to captivate the audience; as he puts it himself, “I want your eyes to dance when you look at my artwork”. In summer 2024, he was the Artist-in-Residence at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans.
Jas Turk
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Jas Turk is a self-taught mixed-media collage artist with a background in cultural sustainability. Working with archival photographs and other repurposed materials, they piece fragmented memories into novel visual narratives. Turk understands their practice as a deliberate act of remembrance: creating “sacred spaces of visual memory”. In the artist’s archives, personal lived Black American experience meets greater familial history; past tributes exist alongside hopeful visions of the future. Their commitment to continuing Black culture through collage illustrates how ancestral memory can be continually reshaped and celebrated.
Turk’s work has been featured in various group exhibitions across the states as well as national and international media like Queer Kentucky or Room Magazine. Recently, they founded the Black Collage Collective, a group of Black collagists dedicated to documenting Black pasts and presents.
Russell Scott (Modest Art 88)
Based in Culver City, California, artist Russell Scott brings together the worlds of dance and painting. Though his creative interests took root in early childhood, it was not until six years ago that he took up visual arts more seriously. “Growing up in a small town, there was no opportunity for me to attend any arts program”, he notes. As a self-taught painter, Scott champions a method that lies far from tradition. Working primarily with acrylics, he crafts abstract works inspired by music and movement – from more conventional canvases and customised clothes, to decorative skateboard decks. His creations remain in conversation with his eclectic educational background of sociology, dance, and arts administration.
Scott has displayed his creations in solo exhibitions across Los Angeles. A regular presence at Miami Art Basel, he has been recognised as the fair’s Spotlight Artist. His artworks were also featured in Oprah Winfrey’s documentary Single Black Female (2022). Through his works, Scott hopes to inspire others to pursue their artistic dreams, regardless of their background. Having founded Creative Genius Academy, a mobile arts programme providing creative opportunities to disadvantaged youth, he is fulfilling his lifelong desire to leave a lasting impact in the community through his creative endeavours.
Kia Michelle Benbow (Kia LaBeija)
Kia Michelle Benbow is a multidisciplinary artist of African American and Filipino descent living in New York City. Under the name Kia LaBeija, she creates autobiographical and autofictional pieces exploring her gender, sexuality, cultural identity, as well as her experience as an HIV survivor. Working across the disciplines – from text to photography, film, and performance – LaBeija strives to enact as well as re-imagine her lived experience. The resultant “performative self-portraits” deploy dream-like visuals to weave stories of identity at the intersection. A core member of the Royal House of LaBeija, the artist is also involved in New York’s vibrant House and Ballroom Scene. She has appeared in music videos (such as Pillar Point’s Dove, 2016) as well as series, including Ryan Murphy’s ballroom drama POSE (2018-2021).
LaBeija’s work has been featured in group and solo exhibitions, including displays at Tate Modern, Museum of the City of New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Fotografiska. Her name has been associated with numerous prominent brands and institutions. Among others, the artist has been featured in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, The New York Times and Dazed.
Ryan C. Hamilton
Ryan C. Hamilton is a Brooklyn-based documentary photographer focusing on Black and queer experience. His works take on a sociological lens, capturing people and culture with real intimacy and candidness. “It has always been important for me to be honest in my work, to reflect the times, and how things and people actually are”, he highlights. As a former historian of a university organisation, Howard imbues his photography with an archivist impulse, giving exposure to unseen beauty, complexity, and resilience of Black and LGBTQ+ communities, prompting others to tell stories of their own – so that they remain there for future generations. Throughout the years, Hamilton came to specialise in live event and lifestyle photography, as well as portraiture.
His works have been featured across the United States, including the Superfine! Art Fair in Washington, DC (2023) or Connecticut’s Armstrong Art Gallery (2024). His A Day in Life series was commended by The Image Gallery, granting him an entry into the Queer Conscious juried show. In 2022, his photographs for Amazon Music illuminated a Times Square Billboard. Beyond Amazon, some of Hamilton’s biggest clients include Warner Music Group, Discovery, and Oprah Winfrey Network.
Kiera Rahming-Reed
Kiera Rahming-Reed is an educator turned woodworker living and creating in Georgia. Her practice bridges artistic freedom with pedagogical principles, yielding eclectic 3D pieces. Working with power tools, like the scroll saw, she bridges artistic freedom with the very rigour and precision demanded by her former job. The COVID-19 lockdown saw her embark on a quest of artistic exploration, unexpectedly transforming her hobby into a passion – or indeed, a profession. It was then that she founded her small business, Summer Orchid.
Black people constitute both the subject and the inspiration of her woodwork pieces. Rahming-Reed is particularly interested in channelling the joys of her culture, carving love into every crevice of her woodwork. “Our pain and trauma are always highlighted in the media, but I don’t want to be a part of that narrative. I prefer to portray the joyful, creative, and loving sides of us”, she stresses. All throughout, Rahming-Reed hopes to inspire others to answer their creative call – just like she did a few years back.
Devin N. Morris
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Devin N. Morris is a multimedia artist currently living and working in New York. His creative practice spans collage, painting, text, found objects, photography, as well as video, unsettling conventions surrounding gender and family life through recursive patterns of harmony and dissonance. Portraying acts of kindness and personal innocence against surreal backdrops, Morris reimagines social boundaries imposed on interpersonal relationships to challenge the tropes of American domestic prosperity.
In Morris’s creative assemblages, each material carries a story. Inspired by his early interest in familial dynamics, his oeuvre doubles as an archive. The artist explores how intimacy and ownership can alter – and, indeed, aggrandise – mythologies of domestic spaces, breaking down one’s expectations of spaces they hold within and outside of themselves. Morris’s commitment to envisioning new realms of existence has attracted attention in- and outside of the United States, giving way to solo and group exhibitions of his artworks.
Ari Moren
In the work of Brooklyn-based artist Ari Moren, belonging constitutes both theme and tenor. She sees her creative practice as a means of connection, hoping for the audience to see themselves reflected on her canvas, regardless of their background or identity. In Moren’s vivid portraits, explorations of universal themes of love and belonging parallel a commitment to celebrating the Black experience. Each of her brush strokes carries a dedication towards inclusion, towards visibility.
Zahyr Lauren (The Artist L.Haz)
Zahyr Lauren – also known as The Artist L.Haz or, simply, Z – is a multidisciplinary artist based in Seattle. Their creative journey began back in 2015, when they were working as an attorney in New York City. Having experienced health issues due to accumulated stress, they found solace in art. “Drawing was what was saving my mental space. I think when you find something like that, you have to honor it and really pay attention to it”, they note. True to their words, this meditative daily art practice soon turned into a career. To overwhelming support of their immediate community, they pursued art more seriously and, having produced over forty pieces throughout morning and evening drawing sessions, they were ready to put on their first art show in 2017. Now, they bridge art with their human rights investigator background as the founder of Koro Rules The Sun: an art, education, and advocacy company.
Spanning drawing, painting, fashion design, and installation, Z’s practice transforms traumatic memory into art. In doing so, the artist looks for ways to reimagine the pain rather than merely replicate it, championing persistence in the face of personal and collective struggle. As they say, “through all that we have been through, and through all that we go through, we are still here. We are still resilient. We are still creating. We are always rebuilding and moving forward”. All throughout, Z sees their Southern Black matriarchal heritage as an inseparable element of their creative process. Their vision takes root in global justice and solidarity. With an aim of uplifting communities and conveying impactful stories, Z’s artworks figure as a kind of creative activism.
Jose Duran
Jose Duran is a Dominican multidisciplinary artist based in Bronx, New York City. Covering painting, sculpture, or even fashion and furniture design, his creative practice unveils a constant search for ways of interpreting the artist’s ideas about himself and his immediate surroundings. Mixing the exuberance of baroque and rococo interiors with raw plant motifs, his works exude a real playfulness. Inside these “fantastical worlds of cosmopolitan opulence”, Black feminine figures constitute an important presence. Through these central portrayals, the artist reclaims their contributions to Western taste and labour.
Simultaneously though, he pays tribute to his late mother, whose love for elaborate soirees and lavish interior design planted within him a seed of appreciation for beauty. Showcased in the United States as well as his native Dominican Republic, Duran’s works strive to refigure people’s views towards the artist’s cultural background, offering them a glimpse into “the baroque Afro-Caribbean identity”.
