Sasha Velour

At 36 years old, Sasha Velour has this physical status:

Career

In 2013, Velour and her partner John Jacob Lee (also known as Johnny Velour) moved to New York. She created comics and zines that she self-published and sold at conventions. Velour's artwork was also published in The Nib, InkBRICK, Comics Workbook Magazine, QU33R, Cicada Magazine, and others, as Sasha Velour and Sasha Steinberg. Velour also created Stonewall, which told the tale of the Stonewall riots using both real and fictional characters. Highlow Comics' "a smart, beautiful, and artful reflection on a significant and difficult historical event" featured the work. Two solo gallery shows have been held in Velour's visual art. In spring 2014, a show entitled "What's Your Drag" was on display at Be Gallery NYC (in association with BeFluent, the English school where she worked), as well as another solo exhibition entitled "Nightrooms" on display at the Black Box Gallery (located in Bizarre Bushwick) in Brooklyn. Velour's cut paper work was part of the opening of the Bureau of Agricultural Queer Division in Manhattan in November 2012. Velour created a long-sleeve T-shirt for "Contemporary Drag," a limited-edition fashion line for the New Art Dealers Alliance's (NADA) in collaboration with Print All Over Me, which took place in March 2017.

While studying at The Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont, Velour began performing in drag. When she was working in a production of Annie, she met her partner John Jacob Lee (known as Johnny Velour) in Vermont. In the spring of 2013, Velour and her partner produced Whatever She Wants, A Drag Musicale at the Main Street Museum, a drag musicale starring local people. She called the show a "milestone" of her drag career and then moved to Brooklyn later this year.

Velour began appearing in New York City in early 2014. Velour, the Drag Magazine (originally named Vym), a drag magazine, was founded by her partner Johnny in the summer of 2014. Interviews, as well as diverse art styles such as photography, poetry, and illustration that explore drag's history, appearance, and purpose were included in the magazine. The magazine was converted into a 300-page hardcover book in 2018. Three issues were published over two years, and three issues were published in 2018.

In August 2015 at Bizarre Bushwick, Velour began a monthly drag show, NightGowns. The show has been broadcast at Bizarre Bushwick and National Sawdust, both in Brooklyn New York. The New York Times has described the performances as "beautiful and funny, as well as politically charged." It was later turned into a Quibi television series.

Velour applied for RuPaul's Drag Race's eighth season, but was not chosen to participate. She appeared on and ultimately won the ninth season of the show in 2017. By The A.V., Velour's lip sync to Whitney Houston's "So Emotional" in the season finale was dubbed "performance of the year." Entertainment Weekly named Club and "Best Musical Moments" one of "TV's Best Musical Moments. During Kate McKinnon's portrayal of Elizabeth Warren, the lip-sync was later discussed on Saturday Night Live, during Elizabeth Warren's appearance on Saturday Night Live.

Velour appeared in the music video for the non-record single "C.L.A.T." during the show's airing. Peppermint, Aja, and Alexis Michelle, all of whom appeared on the ninth season of Drag Race, joined together by fellow New York drag artists Peppermint, Aja, and Alexis Michelle.

Velour founded The House of Velour in 2017, a production company that she uses to produce stage, film, and merchandise. The company, according to KC Ifeyani of Fast Company, was "disrupting the market of drag." Velour's drag show NightGowns grew from Bizarre Bushwick to National Sawdust in April 2017. The tour also went to Los Angeles, London, and Janet Jackson was in attendance at Terminal 5 in New York City.

In 2018, Velour partnered with Opening Ceremony to host and direct their New York Fashion Week display. In New York Fashion Week's first all queer display in history, Velour selected 40 LGBTQ+ celebrities to walk. Other notable drag performers (Lypsinka, Shea Couleé, Jiggly Caliente, Miss Fame, Farrah Moan, Hungry, and others) were among the show's highlights (including Christina Aguilera's surprise appearance.

In 2017, Google hired Velour to create a Google Doodle of German singer-actress Marlene Dietrich, which appeared on Google's homepage on December 27, 2017, the 116th anniversary of Deitrich's birth. In the Snatch Game challenge on season 9 of RuPaul's Drag Race, Velour impersonated Dietrich. Velour's website launched a comprehensive history of the Stonewall rebellion in 2019 on the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. She had started working on the comic years before starting her doctoral research at the Center for Cartoon Studies; a previous iteration of the comic was published in 2012 under the name Stonewall.

Velour was featured in "Power of New York List 2019," and she appeared on Out's annual OUT100 list twice (2017 and 2019). Velour 12th on their list of "America's Most Popular Drag Queens" in June 2019, a ranking of 100 former Drag Race contestants.

Velour created "Faces of Drag" a series of papier-mâché masks that pay tribute to ten pioneers of "the world history of drag" during a period of solitaryity triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic in the summer of 2021. Izumo no Okuni, Rebecca and Her Daughters, William Dorsey Swann, Mei Lanfang, Barbette, Josephine Baker, Coccinelle, José Sarria, and Divine were among those highlighted by the film.

Velour spoke at the Teen Vogue Summit (June 2018), The Long Conversation at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. (Dec. 2018) and colleges such as Purdue, The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Columbia, Oakland University, and others. Velour has appeared on panels hosted by Lyft, Netflix, Mercedes Benz, Fast Company, Jewish Queer Youth, and others.

Velour has appeared on the front page of Wussy Mag, Plastik Magazine, Bricks, GayTimes, and her pet Italian Greyhound, Vanya's, cover shoot for Dog Magazine, which also included an interview with Velour. In People magazine, her house was featured.

Velour self-produced Pirate Jenny, which featured Velour's own translation of the famous The Threepenny Opera song of the same name in 2018. The work was on display at the Rhode Island School of Design in November 2018 as part of the group art exhibition "Bona Drag: An Incomplete History of Drag and Cross-Gender Performance in Film and Video Art (Part 1)."

Velour appeared on television shows The Bold Type and Broad City in 2019.

Velour converted NightGowns' stage performance into an 8-episode docu-series for Quibi's short-form website, and the show premiered on April 6, 2020. She was executive producer and appeared on the program and produced it with the Documentary Group and music video producer Sophie Muller. Velour and a cast of drag actors were followed by NightGowns over eight episodes as she turns NightGowns into a full-fledged stage act. It was "among the most life-affirming shows you could find on any website," the New York Times said. Quibi also began operations in August 2020, but Quibi halted operations in late 2020. NightGowns received the RealScreen Award for "Digital Content, Short Form Content, Non-Fiction" in 2021.

Velour appeared in Angélica Negrón's The Island We Made, a short art-opera film commissioned by Opera Philadelphia in March 2021. Matthew Placek produced the film.

During a seven-city tour of Australia and New Zealand produced by ITD Events, Velour premiered her first evening-length solo theater performance, Smoke & Mirrors in Canberra, Australia. Smoke & Mirrors' premiere in the United States took place on March 21, 2019, at New York Live Arts, where it appeared in eight sold-out shows. Velour appeared at The Theatre At The Ace in Los Angeles in May 2019, and she appeared at The O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire in London on August 9 and 10. At Urbana-Champaign, the performance was also presented at Purdue University and the University of Illinois.

On October 21, 2019, a 23-city (24 show) tour of the United States and Canada began in San Antonio, Texas, and then closed in San Francisco, California, on November 30, 2019. In Birmingham, England, a 16-city tour of the United Kingdom and the European Union began on March 2, 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the tour was cut short after seven performances. On March 11, 2020, the last performance was staged in Dublin, Ireland. The European tour revived in February 2022 in 36 cities in 17 countries, ranging from Ireland to Poland.

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