Image: Installation view, Live Pridefully: Love and Resilience within Pandemics, Queens Museum. Photo credit: Hai Zhang.
LIVE PRIDEFULLY: Love and Resilience within Pandemics - The Exhibition
Photo by TrinCity Photos
Caribbean Equality Project
est. Queens, NY, 2015
Qween Jean, Live Pridefully, 2021
Digital Print
Photography by Christian Thane
Courtesy of Caribbean Equality Project
Qween Jean (she/her/hers) is a Haitian New York City-based costume designer who has draped over fifty shows, and is fully committed to advocacy for marginalized communities, especially Black Trans people. She is passionate about creating not only space but access for unsung heroes and folks who are often overlooked, shunned, and abandoned, as their stories are valuable and deserve recognition. Her work etches histories untold and not fully realized. Qween is able to adorn bodies and, through storytelling, facilitate dialogue.
A South Florida native, Qween began her theatre career at the Florida School of the Arts. She stepped into her calling and followed it all the way to North Carolina, where she continued her education and obtained a bachelor's degree in Business Communications at the University of North Carolina. Afterward, she trained at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and received an MFA in Design. Qween is among the few costuming professionals in New York City theatre who live their Trans identities out loud, while making an effort to ensure she is not the last.
In 2020, Qween founded the Black Trans Liberation, an organization that aims to provide access and employment resources for the Trans Gender Non-Conforming (TGNC) community. Through this organization, she has facilitated community events, protests, and mutual aid in an effort to denounce the actions of a disenfranchised system, calling for an end to racism and White supremacy. She is a firm believer in the preservation and support of Black Trans people and a walking testimony of how one can thrive when adequately paid, supported, and loved. Qween’s motto is “Hire the girls,” and it echoes through time and space.
In 2021, Qween was named an Artist-in-Residence at MOMA PS1. She curated Memoriam and Deliverance, an installation that brought awareness to the last five years of transphobic fatal violence while celebrating Black Trans leaders in the community. She was also the opening speaker at “March On for Voting Rights'' in Washington, D.C. in August 2021.
Her shows include; Our Dear Dead Drug Lord, WP Theatre; One in Two, The New Group; Siblings Play, Rattlestick; Amen Corner, Shakespeare Theatre, Washington, D.C.; Rags Parkland, Arvs Nova; Little Shop of Horrors, Trinity Rep; Good Grief Vineyard Theatre; McBeth in Stride, American Repertory Theatre, Boston; Othello, Trinity Rep; Wig Out!, Semblance, NYTW; Waiting for Godot, The New Group; The Loophole, The Public; Playboy of the West Indies, A Doll’s House and the highly acclaimed What to Send Up, When it Goes Down by Aleshea Harris; BAM & Playwrights Horizons.
Instagram: @Qween_Jean
Website: www.QweenJean.com
Instagram: @BlackTransliberation
Website: www.blacktransliberation.com
Venmo: Miss_Jean
Ca$hApp: $BlackTransliberation
Mgmt: Hello@BlackTransLiberation.com
About Live Pridefully: Love and Resilience within Pandemics:
As part of the Queens Museum’s Year of Uncertainty, the Caribbean Equality Project is proud to present Live Pridefully: Love and Resilience within Pandemics, an interdisciplinary exhibition that celebrates queer and trans Caribbean resilience through a racial justice lens, while fostering critical conversations related to pride, migration, surviving colliding pandemics, and coming out narratives. Caribbean diasporic immigrant rights, gender justice, and trans rights advocates live at the intersections of outdated immigration policies, anti-black violence, racism, homophobia, transphobia, gender-based violence, xenophobia, and misogyny in the United States and throughout the Caribbean region.
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, queer and trans immigrants of color have lived in a constant state of fear and isolation, from food insecurity, a lack of access to equitable healthcare, and rising rates of anti-Asian violence and police brutality against Black bodies. In a year of uncertainty, Live Pridefully reimagines and affirms undocumented Black and Brown LGBTQ+ immigrants and asylum seekers as essential workers, creatives, and contributors to the cultural diversity of New York City.
This interdisciplinary exhibition was originally presented at the Queens Museum from December 4, 2021, to March 6, 2022, as part of the Year of Uncertainty. In 2022, it was transformed into an outdoor photography exhibition shown at Brooklyn Bridge Park during the 2022 Photoville Festival. In 2023, this historic exhibition becomes the first public art installation by Photoville in Richmond Hill, Queens -home to predominantly Indo-Caribbean and South-Asian immigrant communities where Caribbean Equality Project is based.
Curated by Mohamed Q. Amin, portraits of Caribbean LGBTQ+ immigrants anchor the exhibition, with oral Afro and Indo-Caribbean migrant histories and stories driven to construct healing through storytelling, embodied resilience, and intersectional dialogue on postcolonial belonging, anti-Asian hate violence, and Black trans liberation.
Photography: Christian Thane
Visual Director: Richard Ramsundar, Creative Director, The World is Rich Productions
