Collective

  • bashexo

    bashexo was born and raised in South Philadelphia, PA and currently lives in Boston, MA. Zhe is a transdisciplinary installation and performance creative that blends race and queer theory with African diaspora spiritual traditions and aesthetics. Common materials in their work include metals, soil, textiles, audio/video elements, clay, and wood. These materials are then aggregated in order to create alternative ephemeral 3rd spaces that centralize Black and POC queer and trans bodies and experiences. The core of the work centers on explorations into/around Blackness, race, gender, sexuality, homo/transphobia, micro-aggressions, and more recently queer desire.

  • Eva Wu

    Eva Wu is a biracial artist from New Mexico and based in Philadelphia. An interdisciplinary artist and designer, their work spans new media, immersive installation, and social practice. Their work conjures opulent visions, portals to utopia, alternative dimensions and possibilities of what could be. Accused of obscenity, censored consistently, and criminalized as a sex worker, Wu delights in public erotics - generating bold remedies to uproot shame. Their work grants permission to celebrate and inhabit ones innermost fantasies - an antidote to repression and sex-negativity. Eva is a Pew Fellow, a recipient of the Leeway Transformation Award, and a co-founder of Hot Bits.

  • Heart Byrne

    Heart Byrne is a filmmaker, editor and erotic experience curator. Her work explores, place, identity, and the body through personal narrative and fantasy. Raised in New York City by parents who ran a contemporary dance company, her dance background informs her curiosity about the body and performance. She is one of the co-founders of Hot Bits. 

  • JD Stokely

    JD Stokely (they/he) is a trickster-in-training hailing from Philly by way of Boston. They create and curate performances, lectures, and space around queerness, nostalgia, the Black body, and home. Stokely has been working through a series of performance rituals called MOUTH/PIECE that explore the Black feminine mouth as a site of trauma, heartbreak, rage, and resilience. Stokely is a co-founder of Unbound Bodies Collective, a multidisciplinary arts lab for QTBIPOC artists in Boston and beyond that explores the healing possibilities of celebrating community, intimacy, and joy in public.CTOR

  • TopShelf

    TopShelf is a city-dwelling, cuntry-romanticizing kinky queer femme boss. Organizer, activist, facilitator, occasional artist, full time Capricorn, and trained dungeon monitor… for 4 years she co-threw Glitter Thighs (Best Dance Party 2013 CityPaper). She currently facilitates workshops and classes on unlearning and dismantling white supremacy and has peddled sex toys in the woods to 8,000 dykes.

collaborators

  • Icon Ebony Fierce

    Icon Ebony Fierce is a Philadelphia based performance artist and activist that has one mission: to change people's perception of artistic expression one subculture at a time. Icon has a background in theatre, dance, and spoken word performance. Icon also specializes in burlesque, performance art, and drag. Their content includes sex, body positivity, political/social issues, gender equality, etc. Icon is also involved in producing events for Phreak N Queer and co-producing Raspberry Royale and Retrograde Production events.

  • La'Deva Arazel

    Arazel Newman is an otherwordly handsome Gender Queer Faerie and Fetish Muse incarnated in the Chestnut Hill forests of Philadelphia. Cosmic roots and occult influences can be seen in Their many dimensions of Artistic Expression which include co-producing Philly's only Queer POC Burlesque troupe Raspberry Royale; Acting, Modeling, Painting and other Visual and Performance arts. They encourage reconnection to the authentic self through the exploration, validation and  reintegration of the arts, the erotic and the taboo. They also really enjoy eating, fucking and making out with platonic friends.

Past Organizers

  • TJ

    TJ is an educator and art historian who’s been teaching porn studies for nearly a decade. She’s a white cis femme pervert who loves cruising in library stacks, learning about power, and supporting liberation. TJ’s research is based in LGBTQ community archives and has been recognized by the Leeway Foundation and the Leather Archives and Museum. (Hot Bits Organizer 2018-2019)

  • Wit López 

    Wit López is a hairy, disabled, gender non-conforming/nonbinary trans performance/visual artist and independent curator of African American and Boricua descent. Their work explores the absurd and the macabre as tools of healing and decolonization. And honestly, they are probably somewhere laughing right now. (Hot Bits Organizer 2018-2019)

  • Genevieve Diaz y Rodriguez

    Genevieve Diaz y Rodriguez was born in Hialeah, FL while being raised in both Hialeah and San Antonio, TX and now currently lives in Boston. She comes from Cuban, indigenous fierce ancestors. G loves eating and cooking with friends and fam, throwing down on the grill and being a butch Tia. She is a film maker, designer, and cultural organizer while working as a union carpenter. She works mostly with her friends and fam as a collective member in Unbound Bodies, a QTBIPoC multi-disciplinary creative space making and taking effort that centers and creates work for and by QTBIPoC folks, especially seeing this creative effort as a form of healing. (Hot Bits Organizer 2018-2020)