LGBTQ+ non-profit GLAAD presents the third edition of its Equity in Media and Entertainment Initiative (EMEI), an annual programme dedicated to queer black artists from the US. This year, it places a strong focus on twenty Black queer visual artists. Bringing together photographers, digital storytellers, and multidisciplinary practitioners, the initiative highlights artists who engage with memory, politics, and the construction of visual language in real time, positioning their work within the broader context of the current American political and cultural landscape.
In the latest edition, EMEI has widened its understanding of what an artist can be. Supported by Gilead Sciences, EMEI’s 2026 selection of Visual Artists spans a wide range of practices and media, addressing systemic inequities while building a narrative in which intimate and ideological are inseparable. The programme continues to evolve as a platform for emerging voices, reflecting shifting artistic languages and urgent social concerns
Here are ten GLAAD ‘26 creatives that resonated with our team – each expanding the visual vocabulary and charting a path toward bringing marginalised lives into the light.
Tessa Evelyn Scott
Tessa Evelyn Scott‘s creative world spans television, film, and social media – a testament to a career as expansive as it is unexpected. The writer, actress, and content creator traded military service for the Hollywood hills, and has since established herself as a dynamic multimedia presence in Los Angeles.
A graduate of the New York Film Academy in Film and Television Studies, she continues to advance her career, selling three Lifetime movies, producing a viral web series, and making appearances in the writing cohort of the Starz hit series P-Valley. Shaped by an identity across vastly diversifying worlds, Scott’s work is driven by a passion for elevating underrepresented identities and voices – drawing in expansive audiences through dynamic storytelling and universal wit.
Sean Dylan Perry
Shaped by the streets of Brooklyn, Sean Dylan Perry cultivates his own sense of resilience, drawing on it to define his creative voice. His earliest chapters left an indelible mark on his creative soul after being adopted with his siblings. Perry felt a call to weave the jarring narrative of self-acceptance and the enduring presence of hope.
This vision comes alive in his thesis film, Outcome, which unpacks the emotional landscape of identity and coming out, and caught the attention of Fox Soul’s Screening Room with Vivica A. Fox, with recognition that spoke to his deepest convictions.
Immersed in the theatre in his youth, Perry went on to study at the New York Film Academy’s one-year conservatory programme, before moving to Los Angeles to complete a BFA in Acting for Film. Today, Perry continues his craft by composing films that uplift underrepresented voices, such as youth in foster care, that remind communities from many walks of life that one’s beginning is never one’s destiny. Life is about fashioning identity.
Travion Payne
A Houston-born artist whose practice sits at the intersection of psychology, painting, and African American identity. Travion Payne channels both disciplines to bear on the emotional lives of Black men, the wider Black community, and identity. Specialising in textured portraiture, his work moves across some of the most contested terrains in contemporary Black experience – successfully capturing mental health, religion, colourism, homophobia, and fragile masculinity.
Payne’s canvases are often built upon contradiction: immersive yet confrontational, specific yet universal. In works such as Heteronormative: Death of the Golden Child (2020), facial expressions carry the weight of human emotion, with hidden symbolism adding numerous layers of meaning. The pieces draw from both joy and hardship in tandem, each painting celebrating both the power and beauty of love and feeling – challenging observers to bear witness to the unseen.
Devin Wesley
LA-based Devin Wesley is a visual artist whose black-and-white oil paintings navigate the layered complexities of Black identity in the modern world. Wesley’s former career in track and field athletics reached its final chapter after an injury, becoming the catalyst for his journey into the world of art, expression, and rekindled love.
Wesley’s art contends a prominent presence of contrast, with the interplay of light hues and shadow, illuminating brilliance that emerges from embracing both sides of humanity. He uses portraiture as a reflection, creating a space for audiences to sit with the unspoken. His work holds the dualities that define the human experience through the contours of a face as the language of expression, portraying etched vulnerability in visual rawness, strength, and the lightness of nuance in one piece.
Wesley extends his practice into societal impact, having collaborated with notable brands such as Pattern Beauty, Adobe, YouTube, BET, and Listos California on prominent societal issues – ranging from inequality and race to mental well-being and climate change. His work has appeared in curated exhibitions and art fairs throughout the US, most notably the 2024 edition of Frieze Los Angeles.
Jah Beverly
A self-taught contemporary figurative artist, Jah Beverly navigates the tension between chromatic vibrancy and monochrome restraint to excavate the layered, often contradictory aspects of Black trans-masculine identity. His work explores eroticism and self-expression, pushing against dominant narratives of gender and race.
Beverly works primarily on large-scale oil paintings, centring Black trans-masculine bodies whilst merging vibrant colour and striking figuration. More recently, in contrast with viscerally charged works such as FOOL4U (2026) and CRYBABY (2024), the artist has turned to pencil on paper, asserting striking figuration – with the stark disruption of the negative backdrop dismantling traditional frameworks, altering how bodies can be seen and read.
Beverly has nurtured his stylistic curiosity through community and experimentation since establishing himself in Philadelphia. His work has been exhibited at Da Vinci Art Alliance, InLiquid Gallery, and William Way, and he has partnered with Mural Arts Philadelphia on a visual project. His mark on both the art world and the community, as well as on collective belonging, has been recognised through fellowships, residencies, and multiple scholarships from Philadelphia institutions.
Darian Stewart (Bcimanartist)
Known professionally as Bcimanartist, Darian Deshawn Stewart is a New York-based artist, unbound by a single medium, whose practice merges multimedia collage with a surrealist abundance of images. He uses beads, fabric, rhinestones, and paint to build densely layered compositions that unfold only upon closer introspection. Drawing from his own experience navigating life, identifying as a queer Black man, a father, a lover, and a free spirit, Stewart’s work moves swiftly across defining one’s own image within themes such as the African diaspora, sexual liberation, queer navigation, HIV awareness, escapism, and the existence of a life between two worlds.
Stewart holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design and Fine Arts from Arkansas State University and a Master of Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at Silvermine Gallery, ArtCrawlHarlem, and Castle Tafaria in Kenya, with a residency at Chateau d’Orquevaux forthcoming in spring 2026.
Zakari Yonkers
Richmond-based artist Zakari Yonkers works primarily in portraiture, exploring themes of identity, community, and self-expression. Their work brings to life the energy within people and places around them, with each piece reaching toward chromatic visual languages, carrying its own political charge and aesthetic weight through recognisable symbolism. Yonkers draws the viewer into a sense of familiarity through recurring thematic threads, rendered across an ever-shifting range of graphic and representational forms.
Yonkers works mainly in gouache and oil paint. With a growing body of work, they continue to expand their visual vocabulary, aiming for a productive yet positive disorientation to readjust the viewer’s gaze.
Ruhamaiah Bradley
A Brooklyn-based artist and photographer working primarily in portraiture and editorial, Ruhamaiah Bradley explores fashion, intimacy and culture through a perpetually changing American landscape. Bradley captures soft but insistent ways identity asserts itself without proclamation.
Bradley makes tender, rooted images suffused with a quiet, domestic longing – exploring intimacy, environment, and the ways identity is expressed through images that are deceptively simple yet saturated with cultural resonance. Her works exert masculinity, femininity, and the uncharted territory between.
Her practice is built upon care, attention to detail, and a deep sensitivity to what already exists within the frame, and continues to broaden into thematic video and motion collaborative projects with media outlet BOTWC and BEJR Studio.
Sophia Yeshi
New York-based graphic designer and illustrator Sophia Yeshi nfuses her work with a blazing, electric sensibility that pulses with life and colour. Yeshi is rooted in the belief that visuals can connect people in meaningful ways. In her words, her work is driven by a commitment to creating a world she wants to see, producing imagery of high spirit, but rich with purpose and impact.
Yeshi has collaborated with Nike, the National Women’s Soccer League, Madison Square Garden, Goody, Spotify, Apple, and Meta, bringing her distinct visual language and storytelling instinct to each partnership. She draws prominence to her recent collaboration, in which PWHL sees Yeshi take on the role of visual storyteller, weaving Black history into bold, radiant imagery that is unmistakably her own.
Damien Davis
A Newark-based artist and writer, Damien Davis works at the intersection of Blackness and visual culture, examining the histories and systems of representation that shape both US and global Black identity. Drawing on European visual traditions, he engages with the legacy of blackface and reclaims these narratives through his own practice.
Working primarily in laser-cut acrylic, alongside digital media, he builds modular symbol lexicons with renderings that traverse the flat plane and sculptural space, tracing meaning through construction, manipulation, flexibility, and how perspectives can be set by dynamic circulation.
His work has been exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Arts and Design. Davis’ work spans a remarkable breadth of international residencies. He is a regular contributor to the media through outlets such as Hyperallergic and has been highlighted by the New York Times.
