Dante Fuoco is a queer artist & educator based in Brooklyn, NY. His theater/performance work has been produced at Under St. Marks Theater, Dixon Place, Torn Page, Moss Arts Center, Stella Adler Studio of Acting, and elsewhere. The third and final installment of Dante’s solo media performance, SEAL (or, let the record show I was always a faggot), will have a three week run this October in Manhattan. Their writing has been published, or forthcoming, in DIAGRAM, Foglifter, Split Lip Magazine, The Offing, Poets.org, No, Dear, and other places. Since 2012, Dante has worked in and around education in an array of roles, most notably as an elementary special education teacher in New Orleans and restorative justice practitioner/trainer in New York City. Currently, Dante teaches swim lessons to adults, facilitates workshops on creativity, and is developing a restorative justice curriculum and training series for a non-profit in British Columbia. 

artist statement

My journalist parents long espoused the virtue of writing The Truth. Still, I spent most of my life lying: closeted queer for 26 years, I masc'd myself as Straight Boy. This lineage underpins my art, a multidisciplinary practice that draws attention to the fallacy of Objective Truth—not simply uncovering what's been recorded but excavating what's been silenced, how it’s been silenced, and why. My eagerness to puncture heteronormative stories involves queering both content and form: I amplify the pleasures of gay sex and genderqueer expression often though a playful collage of mediums (poetry, solo performance, dance, video art, clown, creative nonfiction, improvisation) that disrupts reductive conceptions of genre. My burgeoning disobedience is anchored by faith that I can use my art to compost harm for, and with, queer comrades. Such composting tends to involve repurposing fraught personal and cultural archives: my family’s home videos, Anna Nicole Smith’s reality TV show. court records from a gay-bashing murder trial, or news coverage of an abandoned pigeon that died after being dyed pink for a gender reveal party. Having worked as a restorative justice facilitator for over a decade, I refuse to sanitize “queer” with politically neutered “pride.” Queer, as in—Free Palestine, Universal Healthcare, Abolish All Prisons, Transformative Justice. “Freedom is not a destination,” writes Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “but a place that we create.” My art strives for that place, that love.