Resurge Chicago: Queer Performance Uprising —
September 5–6, 2025 · Co-Prosperity, Chicago
Schedule —
Fri, Sept 5 · 7–10 pm — Performances
Sat, Sept 6 · 4–6:30 pm — T4T Open Mic
Sat, Sept 6 · 7–10 pm — Performances
This September, Resurge Chicago: Queer Performance Uprising takes over Co-Prosperity in Bridgeport for two nights of radical, experimental performance by queer and trans artists.
On September 5–6, 2025, the Resurge festival gathers some of the city’s most daring performers in movement, ritual, drag, installation, storytelling, and audience-engaged work that suggests as fascist racist homophobic empire gets bolder and more brazen, we can too.
Resurge is launching a response from the Co-Prosperity Programming Council to the recent hits Chicago’s experimental performance ecosystem has experienced since COVID.
Earlier this year we collaborated on the Bridge Performance Incubator (with Hyde Park Art Center), which culminated in June 2025 showcases at Co-Prosperity. Resurge builds on that momentum, and we hope both programs return annually to keep space, resources, and visibility to the Chicago performance community.
Featured Artists —
This year’s lineup brings together a formidable group of artists working across movement, ritual, drag, installation, storytelling, and audience-embedded performance. Expect durational transformations, shimmering acts of queer joy, embodied histories, intimate exchanges, and radical reimaginings of self and community.
2025 artists include:
Efrén Arcoíris · Kezia Waters · Ále Campos · Sungjae Lee · Amari Amai · Camila Arévalo · Hesam Salehbeig · Erika Ordosgoitti · Rosé Hernandez
Detailed Schedule:
Fri, Sept 5 · 7–10 pm · Performances by:
Camila Arevalo, Hesam Salehbeig, Kezia Waters, Alé Campos + Sungjae Lee (with music from Young Joon Kwak)
Sat, Sept 6 · 4:00-6:30 pm
T4T Open Mic
come perform a short queer something on a stage presented by Genderfucked Productions
7–10 pm · Performances by:
Rosé Hernandez, Efrén Arcoiris, Érika Ordosgoitti, Amari Amai
Artists Bios —
Efrén Arcoíris (they/them) is a Chicago-based artist and educator of mixed Mexican and Appalachian roots. Their interdisciplinary practice—spanning performance, installation, sculpture, and drawing— weaves together ancestral histories, queer existence, and radical imagination into a vibrant, living tapestry.
Exploring dynamic landscapes between the spiritual and the mundane, the internal and external, the natural and artificial, Arcoíris uses their body and spirit to activate objects and environments into contemporary folkloric narratives.
They are the co-founder of Burning Orchid, a performance art collective creating dance and film works since 2015. Arcoíris has performed and exhibited internationally across Mexico, Russia, and Japan, with. appearances at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Miami Art Basel, Museo de la Ciudad de México, Post-Butoh Performance Festival in Chicago, and the Shiryayevo Biennale in Samara, Russia.
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Kezia Waters is a Storyteller/ Performance Artist located in Chicago, IL. Their work lives between the worlds of ethnography, folklore, ritual and the living archive. Through surrealism they try to find things that are Holy, Whole, and Holds. A humanist fairy. They have performed in the Biennale d’art Performative de Rouyn-Noranda of Canada, Dazibao Gallery in Montreal and Recto- Verso in Quebec City and numerous galleries around Chicago. Kezia was a 2023 In-Session Fellow at ThreeWalls, studying the Performance and Folklore of Zora Neale Hurston and also an Adjunct Professor of Acting & African American Theatre at Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio. Kezia is also a Jeff Award nominated Theatre Director.
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Ále Campos (b. 1994, Los Angeles, California) is a multidisciplinary artist and performance maker whose elastic studio practice is anchored in the vernacular of drag and their persona, ‘Celeste’. They generate live performance works that are often rhapsodic and mediated by technology, unfolding from and into the mediums of sculpture, sound, text, video and installation. Their work tends to dissect perception and the relational, both aspects that are inherent to the medium of performance. Drag is a conceptual framework through which they consider performance making, specifically the stage and its borders, the malleability of the gaze, how to de/construct an image and how to handle time. Drag is a necessary instrument for them to step into liveness. It is their approach to challenging how we are witness to ourselves and each other, on and off stage.
They received a BA from Bennington College (2016) and an MFA in Performance at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago (2022). Their work has been shown at the Hyde Park Arts Center, NO NATION, Comfort Station, Heaven Gallery, Ruschwoman, Chicago Artists Coalition, Jude Gallery, Roots & Culture, Elastic Arts, SITE/less (Chicago, IL), Lane Meyer Projects (Denver, CO), Collar Works (Troy, NY), September Gallery, The 405 Project (Hudson, NY), Kunsthalle Darmstadt (Germany), SS Gallerie (CDMX), BMOCA (Boulder, CO), Pamplemousse Gallery (Richmond, VA), Public Space One (Iowa City, IA), Crab Shack x Fjord, and Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA). They’ve attended ACRE Residency and are a recipient of the 2022 James Nelson Fellowship Award at SAIC and the City of Hudson’s Tourism Board Grant (2021). They were a 2023 BOLT artist-in-residence at the Chicago Artists’ Coalition and were named one of the ten New City 2023 Breakout Artists of Chicago.
They are currently a lecturer in Performance at SAIC and are an active, participating member of the drag and nightlife community in Chicago, currently holding the title of resident performer / co-producer of Rumors, a monthly event that showcases some of the city’s premiere performers and DJ’s.
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Sungjae Lee (he/they; Chicago, IL) is a visual artist, educator, and writer whose practice centers around the visibility and varied representations of queer Asians. He has presented his works globally in South Korea, Sweden, Canada, New Zealand, and the US. He has had residencies at ACRE, High Concept Labs, HATCH Projects, Fire Island, Vermont Studio Center, Millay Arts, and Yaddo. He was selected for 2025 Queer | Art | Mentorship, the 2024 Chicago Artadia Awards Finalist, 2022-2023 Kala Art Institute Fellowship, Franklin Furnace Fund 2021-22, and the 2020 AHL Foundation Artist Fellowship. He received his B.F.A. in Sculpture from Seoul National University and M.F.A. in Performance Art from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
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Amari Amai is a Black transmasculine storyteller and worldbuilder born and raised in Chicago. As a Great Migration baby with roots in Jackson, Mississippi, Amari’s work is rooted in oral tradition and ancestral embodiment on and off the page, using poetry, folklore, soundscapes, and performance to bend time and immortalize the lives of the disappeared and forgotten. Their work has received support and fellowships from Tin House, Periplus Collective, Sundress Academy for the Arts, Hyde Park Art Center, The Watering Hole, Vermont Studio Center, and Earthseed Black Family Archive Project. Amari is the founder of Crossroads Writers Collective, a communal writing group for Black queer folks based in Chicago. As a 2025 Pushcart Prize and 2025 Best Small Fictions Nominee, they are currently at work on their debut poetry collection with an accompanying series of performances. Find out more at amariamai.com
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Camila Arévalo (San Antonio - Colombia, 1993) is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and animal working at the intersection of performance art, video, sculpture and Installation. Her work creates alternative and even fictional narratives, post-human mythologies, and ways of subverting domination hierarchies starting from the body. She exposes her position as an artist in relation to discussions on gender, trans-feminism, sexuality, desire, and identity politics; the discursive construction of history, the illusion of post-colonialism and the metaphysical belief in humans' natural position of privilege over the planet.
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Hesam Salehbeig (they/them) is an Iranian artist based in Chicago, working across architectural theory, time-based media, and performance art. Their practice explores the intersections of body, gender, psyche, sound, and space through site-specific narrative experiences that investigate the layered entanglements between internal states and external environments. Combining architecture, multimedia installation, storytelling, and performance art, Salehbeig creates immersive, participatory works that shift audiences from passive spectatorship to active engagement and collective embodiment. These works empower participants to play a more creative and collaborative role in their environment, fostering psychological transformation, emotional awareness and resilience .
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Erika Ordosgoitti (Caracas, 1980) lives in Chicago, Illinois. A performance and audiovisual artist and poet, Ordosgoitti holds a degree in Arts with a specialization in New Media from the Instituto Universitario de Estudios Superiores de Artes Plásticas Armando Reverón in Caracas. Over the past 25 years, their research has focused on the study of the concept of freedom in relation to art.
Ordosgoitti is known for their site-specific interventions in public spaces, called "fotoasalto" (photo-assaults), which are performative declarations of freedom meant to bear witness to its fleeting existence and inspire new acts of disobedience. Risk is a significant element in their artistic practice. Their work explores the mechanisms of power that operate on behavior, using her own body as a fundamental signifier and contested space, recognizing it as the primary target of power and, therefore, the primary vehicle for freedom.
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Rosé Hernandez is a visionary artist, choreographer, educator, and arts administrator whose multidisciplinary practice moves through the intersections of spirituality, Latinx culture, and transgender experience. Her work engages in diasporic reclamation, exploring ancestry, belonging, and survival through a post-colonial lens.
Rosé’s performances are living rituals — visceral, resonant acts that reshape the atmosphere. Her body becomes a threshold, a point of crossing where energies converge, stirring the room and summoning the presence of spirit and ancestral memory. In each work, she moves with the audience as witness, sharing in the charged, unspoken power of ritual performance.
As co-director of Burning Orchid, a performance collective dedicated to pushing the boundaries of form, Rosé collaborates to craft immersive experiences that challenge societal norms and honor the multiplicity of human expression. She also co-piloted the Bridge Performance Incubator with Sofía Gabriel at the Hyde Park Art Center, in partnership with Co-Prosperity Sphere, a platform for performance artists to develop new works in dialogue with curators, peers, and audiences.
Her work has been presented internationally at the Museo de la Ciudad de México, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and Shiryaevo Performance Biennale in Russia, as well as in notable venues and festivals including Defibrillator Gallery, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Links Hall, the Chicago Cultural Center, Rapid Pulse International Performance Art Festival, and Human Resources LA.
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About Resurge Chicago: Queer Performance Uprising
Resurge is a gathering of queer performance artists from across Chicago, presenting bold, risk-taking work. The festival honors queer ancestors, amplifies queer futures, and sparks new possibilities for live art in a city where experimental performance spaces are increasingly under threat.
Resurge was conceived of and organized with the hard work of volunteer Programming Council members Rosé Hernandez, Bobby Luck, Mark Jeffery and Ruby Que.
Resurge is partially funded by:
The LGBTQ Community Fund, an operating grant from the Elizabeth Morse Charitable Trust with support from the Chicago Community Trust.
The Reva and David Logan Foundation
and the Joyce Foundation
No “taxpayer funds” were used to fund this queer magic, despite recent homophobic media attacks to the contrary.