Trans Vegas: Dandy Style Trans Takeover

Trans Vegas, is the UK’s largest festival celebrating trans and non-binary artists from Manchester, across the UK and beyond.

E-J Scott: Curator, cultural producer and a dress historian with research ranging widely from 19^th century House of Worth Parisian haute couture to 1960’s Crimplene. In his first ever voluntary role at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, he mounted men’s Regency costume for the Dress for Excess exhibition at the Brighton Royal Pavilion. He went on to care for 14,000 pieces of dress and textiles for the National Trust as Assistant Fashion Curator at Killerton House, Exeter. When not examining fashionable material culture, E-J’s commitment to community work focusses on co-curatorial practices that enable marginalised and misrepresented communities to rewrite their place 

in the museum. He is the founder of the British Digital Art Network (Tate/Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art) and the Museum of Transology. In E-J’s day job, he’s the Stage 2 & 3 Leader of the BA (Hons) Culture, Criticism & Curation at Central Saint Martins. E-J was awarded the UK’s Activist Museum Award 2020/21.Twitter: @MoTransology Insta: @museumoftransology

Krishna Istha: A London-based screenwriter, comedian, performance artist and theatre maker, they make socially conscious, form-pushing works about taboo or underrepresented experiences of gender, race and sexual politics. Currently, they are writing on Sex Education (Netflix, S4) and are a Barbican Centre Open Lab artist (2022). More recently, they co-directed Jazz and Dice by Naked Productions for BBC Radio 4 and were an Arts Admin Bursary Artist (2020-21). If this isn’t enough, the prolific Krishna Istha also was runner-Up on Screenshot, (a competition for comedy writer-performers hosted by Sister Pictures and South of the River Pictures judged by Olivia Coleman, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Lolly Adefope & Rosie Jones.

Libro Levi Bridgeman: Libro trained at E.15 Drama school and toured with new writing theatre companies before turning to writing full time. They wrote and performed in The Butch Monologues 2012-2022 travelling to New York (Abron Arts Centre, La Mama,) Australia Theatre Works, Sydney Arts Centre, and Belfast Black Box. Libro Levi has a Ph. D from UEA in Creative and Critical Writing where they were awarded the HSC Scholarship. BBC Radio 4 writing credits include: Caterpillars (2012, co-written with Charles Lambert), Dogfood Diary (2014, co-written with Charles Lambert). Theatre writing credits include: The Butch Monologues (2013-present day), short stories include: Gregory (Brand Magazine), Letter To My Future Lover (F, M and Other, Knight Errant Press) XXX (Queer Life, Queer Love, Muswell Press), Showstopper (HOME, Manchester). Libro Levi co-runs Hotpencil Press with Serge Nicholson. 

Orlando: Orlando is the drag king persona of Holly James Johnston, a writer and educator currently reading for a DPhil in English at the University of Oxford. As Orlando, Holly melds masculinities and femininities together through lip-sync and dance, and has worked with national organisations such as Tate, The National Gallery, and the V&A. Orlando initially emerged out of Holly’s research focus on historical and literary queer lives. Since then, however, he has begun to take on a life of his own. Once Orlando is out of the closet and on the stage, he very much rules the roost. If Orlando is the star, Holly is his manager, securing his bookings and steaming his outfits…