Celeste Chan and Elliat Graney-Saucke
ART Heart is: a collage, a mixtape, a DIY documentary and tribute to riot grrrl & queercore’s influence on next generations. This is a love letter to queer and trans teens of tomorrow. 1990’s punk feminism tackled rape/abuse, suicide, mental illness, homophobia, body image, disability and more. Riot grrrl’s art, culture, music, and activism made it a vital political movement. ART Heart interviews queer artists to find out how riot grrrl lead to their creative paths. What was it like to come of age in riot grrrl? ART Heart sifts through herstory, and refocuses on the frame on race/class/disability/and resistance within riot grrrl/queercore lineages.
Featuring interviews with: Irina Contreras, Rhiannon Flowers, Nomy Lamm, Darius Morrison, Curran Nault, Clyde Petersen, Gretchen Phillips, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Brontez Purnell, Adee Roberson, Rachel Shannon, Eleanor Whitney, along with Jerry Lee Abram, Celeste Chan, and Elliat Graney-Saucke.
Photo: Yuska Tuanakotta
Celeste Chan writes, makes films, performs, teaches, facilitates, and organizes cultural events. The child of a Chinese immigrant father and a Bronx Jewish mother, she came out queer as a teenager living in Seattle during the 1990’s. Inspired by riot grrrl, Celeste started making films at The Evergreen State College and earned her BA in International Feminism. Since that time, she’s joined film collectives (Shifting Narratives, Folsom St. Film Collective) and won several awards and fellowships (Hedgebrook, Lambda Literary, VONA, Soaring Gardens, and SF Arts Commission). Her recent films, Queer Historical Mixtape (with Irina Contreras), and ABSENCE: No Fats, No Femmes, No Asians have screened at screened at colleges & national/international festivals. Her writing can be found in Ada, AWAY, Citron Review, cream city review, Feminist Wire, Hyphen, The Rumpus, and more. From 2008-2018, she co-directed Queer Rebels, a queer and trans people of color arts project. A lifelong student of alternative education, Celeste coordinates Writing Rainbow: QTPOC FREE School series and serves as Teaching Artist at the Queer Ancestors Project, where she facilitates free writing workshops for LGBTQ youth 18-24 years old. She’s a contributing editor for Foglifte. www.celestechan.com
Elliat Graney-Saucke is a documentary filmmaker, cultural researcher, networker, curator and innovative organizer. Her interests are focused on: cultural equity and intergenerational knowledge exchange; looking at inspiring values and assets of organizations and groups through storytelling; and utilizing creativity, organization and vision to realize great ideas. Since 2000, Elliat has been directing and producing films in the US and Europe through Contrast Vision Productions. Beginning media production education at the Evergreen State College at age 14, she has produced a body of over twenty short films and one completed feature documentary. Currently in production is her first web series Boys on the Inside and her second feature documentary ART Heart: Children of Riot Grrrl. She has produced work in the US, Germany, Denmark, England, Poland, Serbia, Spain, Italy and Canada, with forty film screenings in over thirteen countries. Elliat currently teaches film with Northwest Film Forum and Coyote Central as well as being President of the Seattle Documentary Association. www.elliat-creative.com
Jerry Lee Abram and Alexa Fraser-Herron by Shot in The City Photography
Jerry Lee Abram has spent the last 18 years doing just about anything for queer artists. He has Tech Directed an extensive amount of projects including The Sex Workers Art Show, Homo A Gogo, Fabulous Artistic Guys Get Overtly Traumatized Sometimes: The Musical, Sister Spit, and Queer Rebels. Additionally, his lighting in film can be seen in music videos by Hunx and His Punx, The Younger Lovers, Harlem and Brontez Purnell Dance Company’s film FREE JAZZ.
Brontez Purnell is a prolific artist: zinester, author, musician, dancer, choreographer, actor, filmmaker, and more! Brontez has been publishing, performing, and curating in the Bay Area for over ten years. He is author of The Crusing Diaries, Johnny Would You Love Me if My Dick Was Bigger?, and the cult zine Fag School, frontman for his band The Younger Lovers, and founder and choreographer of the Brontez Purnell Dance Company. Formerly a dancer with Gravy Train!!!, a queer electro indie band that gained national prominence in the mid-2000s, Purnell’s other prominent artistic collaborations include his supporting role in the queer independent feature film, “I Want Your Love” (dir. Travis Mathews, 2012). He was a guest curator for the Berkeley Art Museum’s L@TE program, honored by Out Magazine’s Hot 100 List and Most Eligible Bachelors List, and won the SF Bay Guardian‘s Goldie for Performance/Music.
Nomy Lamm is a multi-media artist whose offerings have included lullabies, zines and comics, a rock opera, an experimental novel, a children’s book, many bands and solo albums, live performances, animated videos, illustrations and poems. She’s worked with Sins Invalid, a disability justice performance project, since 2009 as a performer and program team member. Nomy has been teaching people to sing for almost two decades, helping students move through fear and self-judgement to take up space and find equilibrium in radical authenticity. She has a BA in Multimedia Art and Political Economy from The Evergreen State College, and an MFA in Fiction from San Francisco State University. In her work as a Kohenet (Hebrew Priestess), Nomy offers space for creative exploration and engagement with our wounded places as a source of transformation. She lives on occupied Squaxin/Nisqually/Chehalis land in Olympia, WA with her partner Lisa and their dogs Dandelion and Momma. www.nomyteaches.com.
