Sasha Velor

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Sasha Velor at Dragcon in New York City (2017)

Sasha Velor (born June 25, 1987 in Berkeley as Alexander "Sasha" Hedges Steinberg ) is a non-binary American comic artist and drag queen who often uses elements of the theater in her drag performances . She was best known as the season nine winner of RuPaul's Drag Race . In 2019, New York magazine voted Velor twelfth among the top twenty most influential drag queens in the United States.

Life

Sasha Steinberg was born in 1987 in Berkeley, California , but lived in New Haven until she was nine . After that, the family moved to Urbana in the state of Illinois , where his father Mark D. Steinberg as a history lecturer at the at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign worked. Steinberg's mother, Jane Hedges, was an editor at Yale University Press and editor-in-chief of the cultural magazine Slavic Review , which focuses on the Eurasian , Central and Eastern European region.

On his father's side, Steinberg has Russian-Jewish roots and also practices the Jewish faith. According to Steinberg, the personal religious identity is not shaped by specific places or languages, but by various cultural rituals and family traditions, since the Jewish ancestors lived in different countries. Drag art is similar because it is based on different art styles and not a specific type of gender expression.

After graduating from the local University Laboratory High School in 2004, Steinberg went to Russia and Germany for some time . Steinberg completed an internship at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin , and a few years later in the United States, Steinberg graduated from Vassar College with a degree in literature . Steinberg then traveled to Moscow as a member of the Fulbright Program and did research there on LGBT activism. Because every project had to be approved in advance by the Russian government, Steinberg stated in order to obtain permission to research political street art . In 2013, Steinberg received a master's degree in comic drawing from the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont and then worked in various professions. Steinberg taught English at a local school, instructed participants in a pottery course and drew for a children's comic book publisher.

While studying in Vermont, Steinberg met his later life partner John Jacob Lee at a performance of Annie , in which he played. The two often work together, with Lee going by the stage name Johnny Velor. Steinberg identifies himself as genderfluid , a non-binary gender identity . In relation to himself, Steinberg says he uses the gender-neutral pronouns they / them and only uses feminine pronouns in his job.

Steinberg's artist name is derived from his real first name and the textile fabric velor . Steinberg names Jean-Michel Basquiat , Keith Haring and Andy Warhol as artistic role models . At drag performances, Steinberg very rarely wears wigs , as is actually common in the industry, but appears with a shaved head. This is a tribute to the mother who died in 2015 and who lost her hair as a result of chemotherapy . Another of Steinberg's trademarks is a painted mono-brow . According to his own statements, while working as a drag queen, Steinberg always tries to reverse mainstream ideas of beauty, for which a mono-brow is well suited, since many people consider it an ugly facial feature. Steinberg came up with the idea of ​​monobrow not only through a preference for the figure Nosferatu , but also Frida Kahlo , whose distinctive eyebrows, in Steinberg's opinion, served as self-honoring.

Career

Comic artist

Sasha and Johnny Velor moved to Brooklyn in 2013 . Sasha initially earned her living there by selling individual drawings and short comic books. Velor's work has also been published in several magazines, including a comic about the Stonewall uprising from the perspective of several fictional and real people. Drawings by the artist were also the focus of several exhibitions, including Nightrooms , which took place in November 2015 at the Black Box Gallery in Brooklyn. In March 2017, Velor designed a T-shirt alongside other drag queens on behalf of the artist collective New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA for short) for their Contemporary Drag fashion line and performed at one of their art events.

Drag queen

Beginnings

Velor at Dragcon 2018

During her studies at the Center for Cartoon Studies, Velor made her first drag appearances. In early 2013 she and her partner Johnny Velor organized the musical Whatever She Wants, A Drag Musicale at the Main Street Museum in White River Junction . The ensemble of the performance consisted entirely of amateur actors living in the community. In 2015 Velor published the drag magazine Vym for the first time together with Johnny , for whose art section she acts as department head. Von Vym , later renamed Velor, The Drag Magazine, has so far published three issues, and in 2018 a 300-page book came out, including collages , photographs, photo novels and illustrations published in the publication . Since August 2015, Velor has hosted Nightgowns , a monthly drag show in Brooklyn that grew out of the launch celebration for the magazine's first issue. The show initially took place at Club Bizarre , and since 2017 at the National Sawdust . The individual members of the ensemble can freely decide which kind of art they want to perform. For example, performances can be seen alongside vocal performances of various genres, dance performances and lipsyncs . In contrast to the usual drag shows, nightgowns ask the audience to watch the performances silently and only applaud at the end.

"RuPaul's Drag Race"

On February 2, 2017, Velor was announced alongside 13 other candidates as a participant in the ninth season of RuPaul's Drag Race . She won two of the twelve main tasks named challenges , these were the production of a fictional breakfast television program and a fictional pilot episode . In these challenges , she worked with her colleague Shea Couleé , with whom she shared the victories. Velor worked on the house song CLAT and the accompanying music video together with her colleagues Aja , Alexis Michelle and Peppermint during the season .

Velor finally reached the final on June 23, when the last four candidates had to compete for victory in lipsync duels for the first time. The duel between Velor and Couleé took place for the song So Emotional , with Velor taking off her wig during the second chorus, which contained red rose petals that she showered herself with. After Velor progressed, she was victorious in the last lipsync against Peppermint and finally won the entire season. Velor rose petal performance was named one of the best final appearances in the show's history by several reviewers, including previous winner Bob the Drag Queen , and was later mimicked by Kate McKinnon in her role as Elizabeth Warren on Saturday Night Live .

Career after "Drag Race"

After winning the Drag Race, Sasha and Johnny Velor founded The House of Velor , a film and theater production company. In addition to other performances of nightgowns in New York, Sasha toured Los Angeles and London with the show . For their professional accomplishments, she was in the 2017 and 2019 OUT100 elected LGBT people in the USA the 100 most influential, in the latter year, she was also in the Variety List Power of New York List represented the city's major queer media professionals. In June 2019 she was ranked twelfth of the 100 most important drag queens in the United States by New York .

In 2018 Velor hosted an event at New York Fashion Week for the Opening Ceremony fashion label , where 40 queer models walked the catwalk. In addition to her colleagues Couleé and Farrah Moan , Christina Aguilera was also on stage, who made a spontaneous appearance there.

After the victory, Velor was invited to speak at several events, including The Long Conversation at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.At this event, artists and journalists such as Alfre Woodard and David Brooks exchanged ideas on the subject of shaping the future. Velor also acted as a conversation partner at other discussion groups, including at the Teen Vogue Summit 2018 , where she spoke to young people about the social significance of drag, and in 2021 with Peppermint at LGBT events at Columbia University and Oakland University .

actress

In 2018 Velor produced a short film entitled Pirate Jenny . In this she sang in the role of a variety artist her own English translation of the German song Die Seeräuber-Jenny from The Threepenny Opera with modified text. Her mother played the song for her as a child, and Velor immediately took a liking to it. She likes the play because she generally appreciates stories in which characters who actually have no power turn out to be villains, pirates or spies. The production premiered in the exhibition Bona Drag: An Incomplete History of Drag and Cross-Gender Performance in Film and Video Art (Part 1) at the Rhode Island School of Design .

In 2019 Velor appeared in short guest roles in the series The Bold Type and Broad City . Early that year, she toured with her drag show Smoke & Mirrors first by Australia and New Zealand . In this, Velor falls back on the methods of the theater, so each performance is divided into several acts in which the artist performs different lipsyncs. The stage design is different every time; so one was designed like a typical music video from the 1980s including digital background dancers. Another Lipsync featured a drawn apple on a canvas in the background, slowly rotting, which was undone at the end of the song.

After the first tour, several performances took place from March to August in New York, London, Los Angeles as well as at the Universities of Purdue University and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. From October to November Velor toured several cities in Canada and the USA with Smoke & Mirrors , the following year a Europe-wide tour was supposed to take place, which was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic and postponed indefinitely.

On April 6, 2020, the documentary series Nightgowns celebrated its premiere on Quibi , which is about the production process and the members of the Velours show of the same name. She acted as executive producer and worked with music video director Sophie Muller . Nightgowns was actually extended for a second season, but due to the discontinuation of the streaming service in October of the same year, no new episodes followed for the time being.

In March 2021, Velor played the lead role in the short opera film The Island We Made . This was created on the initiative of the Philadelphia Opera and is about mother-daughter relationships. The story was told by a song sung off- screen, performed by Velor per lipsync, and she also wrote the script together with the composer Angélica Negrón .

Relation to Marlene Dietrich

On December 27, 2017, a Marlene Dietrich portrait by Velor was shown as a Google Doodle on the occasion of the 116th birthday of the actress . The artist told Google that Dietrich inspires her very much because she defied social norms and went her own way. She is also an artistic role model for the drag queen because of her strong and mysterious aura on the screen.

Dietrich also imitated velor in Drag Race as part of the Snatch Game improvisation challenge . In this, the candidates from RuPaul have to complete the given statements as humorously as possible, without falling out of the role of the celebrities they are portraying. Velor wore a typical Dietrich suit including gloves and at play cylinder . When answering the questions Velor spoke with a German accent and made several allusions to Dietrich's very open approach to her sexuality, among other things by claiming that " bisexual Teutons " are the best lovers. In addition, "Dietrich" joked that she was often considered a lesbian because of her suit ; “Dietrich” also answered the question of what could be swapped with a new Snapchat function other than portrait photos, in German with potatoes, tomatoes and sauerkraut . She justified the latter answer with her seclusion and her death several decades ago, due to which she was not even familiar with newfangled things like Snapchat.

Web links

Commons : Sasha Velor  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

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  3. ↑ Abigail Weil: Sasha Velor's “Smoke & Mirrors”: Long Live The Queen. In: The Theater Times. March 29, 2019, accessed December 3, 2021 .
  4. ^ Slavic Review. In: Slavic Review. Accessed December 3, 2021 .
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  13. ↑ Kevin Phinney: Drag Race Winner Sasha Velor Explains How She Got Her Drag Name. In: Metrosource. June 28, 2017, accessed December 3, 2021 .
  14. ^ Hilton Dresden: All Eyes on Sasha Velor: How the Drag Race Winner is Championing Queer Voices. In: Out. September 7, 2017, accessed December 3, 2021 .
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  16. ↑ Kyle Munzenrieder: Sasha Velor Explains That Flower Stunt and the Inspiration Behind Her Eyebrows. In: W. June 26, 2017, accessed December 5, 2021 (English).
  17. ↑ Laura Sanchez: Nightgowns Series Brings the Fabulous World of Drag To You. In: V. April 13, 2020, accessed on December 3, 2021 (English).
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  29. ↑ Joe Lynch: "RuPaul's Drag Race" Season 9 Queens From NYC Team Up for "CLAT" Video: Exclusive. In: Billboard. April 21, 2017, accessed December 3, 2021 .
  30. ↑ Meka Beresford: And the winner is… RuPaul's Drag Race season nine finale recap. In: PinkNews. June 25, 2017, accessed December 3, 2021 .
  31. ↑ Michael Cuby: Bob the Drag Queen on “RuPaul's Drag Race” Season 9's Winner. In: Teen Vogue . June 26, 2017, accessed December 3, 2021 .
  32. ↑ Chancellor Agard: TV's 9 best musical moments of 2017. In: Entertainment Weekly . December 27, 2017, accessed December 3, 2021 .
  33. ↑ Joel Kim Booster: RuPaul's Drag Race Season-Finale Recap: And the Winner Is… In: New York. June 23, 2017, accessed December 3, 2021 .
  34. ^ Allison Shoemaker: Looking for the performance of the year? Watch 2 minutes of RuPaul's Drag Race. In: The AV Club. December 26, 2017, accessed December 3, 2021 .
  35. ↑ Karen Valby: Saturday Night Live: Bow Down to Kate McKinnon's Elizabeth Warren. In: Vanity Fair . October 13, 2019, accessed December 3, 2021 .
  36. ↑ Stephen Daw: Sasha Velor Casts Shea Couleé, Vander Von Odd & More for Her DragCon NYC “Nightgowns” Show. In: Billboard. August 30, 2018, accessed December 3, 2021 .
  37. ↑ Sasha Velor's Nightgowns. In: National Sawdust. Accessed December 3, 2021 .
  38. ↑ Out100 2017. In: Out. November 8, 2017, accessed December 3, 2021 .
  39. ↑ Mikelle Street: Out100 Drag Queens of the Year: Trixie Mattel, Sasha Velor, Shangela. In: Out. November 21, 2019, accessed December 3, 2021 .
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  41. ^ The Most Powerful Drag Queens in America: Ranking the new establishment. In: New York. June 10, 2019, accessed December 3, 2021 .
  42. ↑ Cady Lang: A Comprehensive Guide to the Most Show-Stopping Moments of New York Fashion Week. In: Yahoo . September 15, 2018, accessed December 3, 2021 .
  43. ↑ Dominic Cadogan: Xtina, Sasha Velor, and all your Drag Race faves slayed Opening Ceremony. In: Dazed. September 10, 2018, accessed December 3, 2021 .
  44. ^ Helen Andrews-Dyer: Smithsonian brings together big thinkers - from Alfre Woodard to Sasha Velor - for a “long conversation”. In: The Washington Post . December 9, 2018, accessed December 3, 2021 .
  45. ↑ Gabe Bergado: Sasha Velor on Dressing Like Queer Royalty and How Youth Can Learn About LGBTQ History. In: Teen Vogue. June 27, 2018, accessed December 3, 2021 .
  46. ^ A Night with Peppermint and Sasha. In: Columbia University . Accessed December 3, 2021 .
  47. ↑ Lauren Karmo: Campus Drag queens Peppermint, Sasha Velor kickoff Pride Month. In: The Oakland Post. March 9, 2021, accessed December 3, 2021 .
  48. ↑ Fran Tirado: Sasha Velor's Newest Film Project Celebrates the True Diversity of Drag. In: Them. May 3, 2018, accessed December 3, 2021 .
  49. ^ Bona Drag: An Incomplete History of Drag and Cross-Gender Performance in Film and Video Art (Part 1) . Rhode Island School of Design (2018), p. 1 ( PDF ).
  50. ↑ Samantha Highfill: Watch The Bold Type cast fangirl over RuPaul's Drag Race star Sasha Velor's set visit. In: Entertainment Weekly. April 17, 2019, accessed December 3, 2021 .
  51. ↑ Shirley Li: Alan Cumming puts a spin on “Be Our Guest” in exclusive Broad City sneak peek. In: Entertainment Weekly. February 27, 2019, accessed December 3, 2021 .
  52. ^ AA Christi: Sasha Velor to Perform Live And In Color in Australia and New Zealand in 2019. In: BroadwayWorld. April 3, 2018, accessed December 3, 2021 .
  53. ↑ a b Alex Blynn: Sasha Velour's “Smoke & Mirrors” Will Distort Your Reality. In: PaperMag.com. March 26, 2019, accessed December 3, 2021 .
  54. ↑ Jonathan Yates: Sasha Velor announces two London shows at O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire - how to get tickets. In: Surrey Advertiser. June 18, 2019, accessed December 3, 2021 .
  55. ↑ a b Joey Nolfi: Drag superstar Sasha Velor reveals Smoke & Mirrors tour dates. In: Entertainment Weekly. September 4, 2019, accessed December 3, 2021 .
  56. ^ Matthew Oates: Purdue LGBTQ Center hosting Sasha Velor and her one-queen show. In: Purdue University . September 13, 2019, accessed December 3, 2021 .
  57. ↑ Sasha Velor's Smoke & Mirrors. In: Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. Accessed December 3, 2021 .
  58. ^ Joey Nolfi: Tip your queens and kings: How coronavirus closures are upending the drag industry. In: Entertainment Weekly. March 19, 2020, accessed December 3, 2021 .
  59. ^ Alison Foreman: Everything coming to Quibi for the streaming service's April launch. In: Mashable . March 6, 2020, accessed December 3, 2021 .
  60. ↑ Dino-Ray Ramos: Quibi Sets “Nightgowns” Series From “RuPaul Drag Race” Winner Sasha Velor. In: Deadline.com . July 29, 2019, accessed December 3, 2021 .
  61. ↑ Dino-Ray Ramos: Sasha Velor's “NightGowns” Docuseries Renewed For Season 2 At Quibi. In: Deadline.com. August 10, 2020, accessed December 3, 2021 .
  62. ↑ Todd Spangler: Quibi Is Officially Dead. In: Variety. December 1, 2020, accessed December 3, 2021 .
  63. ^ Peter Crimmins: "The Island We Made": Lip-Sync Opera And High Drag Sing An Ode To Mothers. In: National Public Radio . March 19, 2021, accessed December 3, 2021 .
  64. ↑ Snatch Game of the ninth season , position at 6:50 minutes.
  65. ↑ Snatch Game of the ninth season , position at 0:40 minutes.
  66. ↑ Snatch Game of the ninth season , position at 8:30 minutes.
personal data
SURNAME Velor, Sasha
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Steinberg, Alexander Hedges (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American comic artist and drag queen
BIRTH DATE June 25, 1987
PLACE OF BIRTH Berkeley , California