 I'm a different kind of storyteller. I don't do it through words. Usually I do it on paper. But I'm going to try to tell you guys a little bit about myself, my work, my process. Like you said, I went to Parsons in New York. Can you guys hear me OK? Can Shorty reach in the mic? OK. Yeah, I went to Parsons and majored in illustration. And then in 1999, a week before my, this is a very personal story, so give me a second. Week before my sophomore year in college, I had an accident. That left me with two compound fractures. A shattered and dislocated my drawing arm, my left foot, and fractured my back. I wasn't sure if, god, I practiced this so many times. I'm good. I got my pen. I like to hold a pen. After an extended hospital stay and multiple surgeries and a year off of school, I made it back and I graduated. This isn't something I talk about very much, especially not in public spaces. But I think it's an important part of my story and so many others. I think invisible disabilities are impactful on those who live with them. And it shapes the artist we become. I know it has shaped the artist I've become. I've become and the person I am. Sometimes I wonder if I chose such a meticulous medium to prove to myself that I could still execute technical drawings. I have to pick and choose what I work on since I can't work as much as I'd like to. Spending 20 to 50 hours drawing one portrait is a constant reminder to myself how far I've come. Soon after I graduated in 2003, I moved to San Francisco, which has been my dream forever since I was a little kid. The first personal project I created was a portrait series of the people I knew here and the new friends I had made. Portraiture has always been a way I can act with my surroundings, my life, a way to share with those around me. It reminds me that we all have a different story to not make assumptions about others but to try to learn as much as we can. I continued to work on my art, having small shows. Started curating art shows at the Lacks, which I did for six years. And I was always drawing or thinking about drawing, but I wasn't really sure where I was going. I started working on Sway, the series that you're looking at, in 2009. It's a portrait project of the queer community here in San Francisco and the various and diverse faces that it holds. I wanted to capture the diversity, humanity, and individuality of our amazing community and try to give visibility to all of us. When I began the series, it was important to me that I created images from start to finish, from choosing the subjects to photographing them, selecting and editing the image, and then drawing them. So you will see over time some of the photos are better than others in the beginning. But this is like wanting to mourn her bathroom before getting ready for booty call. And I went to her house and photographed her and had all these really incredible moments and experiences with all these people. Taking the photos of each person has become a really important part of these drawings. In the past, I shied away from taking my own photos and being so involved in my work. I hung back and I drew from other people's photos. So after I selected the people, I did photo shoots like you're seeing now. And I invited people into my home. If they were so gracious to have me in theirs, I went to their house and if not, we would pick a different location that they felt comfortable. For me, it was just really important that everybody felt at ease wherever they were, right? I assumed it was nerve wracking for other people to be photographed. It was definitely nerve wracking for me to be photographing them. So I just wanted to be sure that everybody felt good wherever they were. I definitely wasn't used to being behind the camera, but as time went on, I started reaching further outside my personal network and friends, which is kind of how this project started. You know, cold calling people in the queer community that I felt were doing something amazing or something I admired or something that was important. And then making a time with them to come to their house or do a photo shoot somewhere else. I think I wrote this somewhere else, but one of my favorite photo shoots was with Melissa King who's a chef and we walked around the fairy building for like an hour and a half and talked about food and how she got started in her Chinese-American family and it was just like a really, I never met her before. It was just like a really amazing experience to have people let you into their world. In 2012, I contracted Lyme disease and I had to take another long break several years off from creating art and from my life for the most part. There's so much to say about this chapter in my life, but what I took away from this was that every time I had to heal from all of these like physical and medical challenges and take a break, when I came back to my work, I felt like I brought something more to it and I think it's allowed me to tell a story on paper that you can't always do through words, like at least beautiful people tonight, but and I think also taking these breaks, it really forced me to be selective, because I have to. I have to, I wish I didn't, I wish I could be as prolific as I wanted, but I can't. But everything I create is, it's meaningful to me and hopefully to other people. This project has been going on for seven years now and I don't know, I think about it kind of like my life's work, something I hopefully won't stop doing no matter what else I'm working on. I got totally lost here, but I don't know if it really matters. I'm sure y'all just want to see me cry in public a lot, but when I was awarded the chance to be a part of Mooney Art, it gave me the opportunity to introduce Sway to my life again and to share it with other people, to our city, to our community. I honestly would never have thought that this project, they said it was seen by 700,000 people a day by different communities and I was so humbled by that opportunity and especially because it was the community that, it was a public vote, it was the community and the people who selected it and I felt like it was my, I was kind of the messenger because it was bigger, it's bigger than me, right? Like having a queer art project on Mooney and showing how diverse we are, right? Everyone in this room, how diverse everybody is that creates this amazing community in San Francisco. Being able to share that was indescribable and hopefully provided something for all of you too, you know? I was gonna talk about my process. I'm not sure if it's really that important at the moment what pins I use in paper and all that, but it's allowed me to connect, I think sometimes, you know, being disabled or being an artist, you isolate yourselves and you, you know, get out of your immediate world and I think especially now that I've revisited it through Mooney art, reaching out to people I don't know and well, and it's been really powerful and I hope that's reflected in the work I'm sharing and that everybody gets to see from me and I'm just gonna throw this away. So, you know, I'm happy to answer any questions about anything in my life, nothing's off the table and I really, I brought a few pieces so that people could look up close because I think it's, you know, it's one thing to see it on a screen and hear me talk about it or look at something on a computer but to see things in person that people make with their hands, you know, I think is a different experience. I think I'm gonna leave it there. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.