Tourmaline

Filmmaker



Pollock Guests

Tourmaline makes film and installed video that highlights the capacity of black queer/trans social life to impact the world while living what is simultaneously an invisible and hypervisible existence. The throughline of her filmmaking focuses on everyday people and their mundane creative acts that blur the lines and liens of what constitutes the public. Her work includes Salacia, Mary of Ill Fame, Atlantic is a Sea of Bones, The Personal Things, Lost in the Music and Happy Birthday, Marsha! She is also an editor of Trap Door, an anthology on trans cultural production published by the New Museum & MIT Press.

She received a BA from Columbia University and is the recipient of the 2018 Publishing Triangle Award, Special Mention at 2018 Outfest Film Festival, 2017 HBO & Queer/Art Prize and 2016 Art Matters Foundation Grant. She is a  2016-2017 participant in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace program, and a 2012-2013 Queer/Art/Mentorship fellow. From 2014-2018 she was Barnard College Research On Women’s activist in resident. Her work has been presented across the world including at the Museum of Modern Art (2019), the Brooklyn Museum (2016, 2019), MoMA PS1 (2019), The Kitchen (2018), BFI Flare (2018), Portland Art Museum (2018), BAM Cinematek (2018), The New Museum (2017), The Whitney Museum (2017), MOCA LA (2017), the Studio Museum in Harlem (2017), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2017).