While most are aware of the existence of contemporary patriarchy, many are left wondering how to engage it actively. What does it look like to question our default positions of dominance, our harmful hegemonies? How have we felt limited in our individual concepts of self? How can engaging a more nuanced gendered understanding expand these? And how do we tangibly embody change?

Through discussion, we’ll engage the frictions within our individual and collective understandings of gender, with a focus on masculinity. Together we will engage the necessity of holding complex and nuanced conversation in order to heal our disconnects and grow liberation.

Chimera Singer, Ocean Shapiro, Samora Pinderhughes, Isaiah Winters, Ashely Tyner, and Van Newman will discuss their own relationship to masculinity in their personal and creative endeavors, and work to answer questions engaging the difficulties of conceptual and lived gender.

This panel is rooted in three foundational truths: that gender is not a binary, that gender is racially constructed, and that all are capable of embodied change and growth. In this panel, we acknowledge that men especially have been declined the tools to grow healthy love, emotion, and communication — and that this work, of building male emotionality, cannot be done in isolation. Engaging hard, scary, and sometimes seemingly “ignorant” questions with genuine curiosity is necessary in breaking patriarchal dominance.

Audience members, both AFK and virtual, will be asked to submit anonymous questions to the panelists. We promise - we want your “stupid” questions.

Introduction to key concepts (20 mins)

Panelist introductions (40–60 mins)

Audience questions (40–60 mins)

Chimera Singer (they/them) is a gender researcher, photographer and creative director who currently lives in Brooklyn. Their commercial and editorial portrait work can be seen in places like The New York Times, Complex Magazine, and Teeth Magazine. They studied photo media with an Othering emphasis at the University of Washington and recently received a graduate degree in Gender and Sexuality at the New School. They seek to actively integrate somatic and artistic practices into their academic queer research. Their writing, research, and multidisciplinary projects are avidly curious, work to break Euro-centric institutional convention, and fall at the intersection of queer, phenomenological, feminist and media theories. Chimera looks to bodies and their mediated expressions and tangible embodiments as avenues to generate Belongings.

Ocean Shapiro (they/them) is an activist for mental health care for people with dissociative disorders, C-PTSD, 2SLGBTQIA+ people, people in poly/kink/platonic relationships, and religious trauma and cult survivors. They received an MSW from UCLA in 2020 and are a consultant for Sensitive Revolution, an organization that works with leaders to cultivate insight and self-awareness. In their spare time, they wear busy button-down shirts and like to think they explore gender with a sense of joie de vivre.

Samora Pinderhughes (he/him) is a composer, pianist, vocalist, filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist known for examining sociopolitical issues and fighting for change through his art. Lauded as "one of the most affecting singer songwriters today, in any genre" by The New York Times and "a magical being" by Forbes, Samora is shaping new worlds through his art, his honesty, and his vulnerability.

Born and raised in the Bay Area, Pinderhughes began playing music at the age of two years and went on to study music at Juilliard where he met his primary artistic mentor, MacArthur-winning playwright Anna Deavere Smith. Pinderhughes has collaborated and performed with a number of artists including Common, Robert Glasper, Karriem Riggins, Kyle Abraham, Sara Bareilles, Daveed Diggs and Herbie Hancock, and his works have been commissioned by institutions including Carnegie Hall, the Sundance Film Festival, The Kitchen, Yerba Buena Center for The Arts, and the Kennedy Center.

Isaiah Winters (he/him) is an interdisciplinary artist, professor and researcher based in New York, NY. He received his BA in Sociology from Salisbury University and MFA in Photography from Parsons School of Design. His photographic, experimental filmmaking and collage work merge the archival with the contemporary to comment on themes of nationalism and indexicality. Through recontextualizing visual media and advertisements he asks viewers to acknowledge their own biases or learned truths. Popular culture and imagery are crucial to everyday understandings of the World around us. Winters is an Air Force veteran with a background in linguistics and data analytics. His work has been exhibited at Rotterdam Photo Festival, Parsons School of Design, Lincoln Center, Penumbra Foundation, Pingyao Photo Festival and Photoville. His work has also been commissioned by The New York Times, New Inc, Baltimore Magazine, SNFCC, US National Park Service and Google.

Ash Tyner (she/her) is a writer, editor and filmmaker interested in reclaiming space to center marginalized voices. Ash focuses on art and culture emerging from the Black diaspora, especially where it intersects with social justice and community impact. She leads partnerships at ALMA Communications, and formerly served as Culture & Special Projects Editor at i-D Magazine after leading Special Projects for GARAGE Magazine. She studied literature at Middlebury College and Columbia University.

Van Newman (they/he) is a Black, queer, transmasculine strategist & screenwriter based in Los Angeles, CA.

Their work focuses on interrogating race, gender/sexuality, technology and the American dream through underdogs & outsiders.

In 2022, he completed the writing track of Lena Waithe's Hillman Grad Mentorship Lab, where he wrote a psychological thriller pilot about social media that is currently in development.

They are also a DJ and music producer under the artist name “Fiveboi”.

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