MIX NYC was founded in 1987 by Sarah Schulman and Jim Hubbard, as The New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival. The organization was born out of the concern that traditional experimental film venues didn’t show LGBTQ work, and the few existing LGBTQ festivals didn’t show experimental film. Jim and Sarah were supported by curators Jack Waters and Peter Cramer from Naked Eye Cinema, and Ela Troyano, who programmed The New York Film Festival Downtown. 

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The first festival was held at the Millennium Film Workshop in the East Village, and called A Queer Sort of Film. The festival emerged as a showcase for new works by established makers, archival masters, and new as yet unknown artists. In concert with the urgent AIDS Activist and Queer Activist movements of the day, The New York Lesbian & Gay Experimental Film Festival (NYLGEFF) became a mass cultural event in the queer underground. MIX exhibited first films by major lesbian, gay and bisexual filmmakers including the world premiere of Su Freidrich’s Damned If You Don’t; Todd Haynes’ college thesis film, Assassins: A Film Concerning Rimbaud, (which got him his first review); Maria Maggenti’s Name Day; the first screening of Paris Is Burning, when it was still on a dual system; and Christine Vachon’s first film. The earliest festivals showed the work of filmmakers such as Barbara Hammer, Nisha Ganatra, Teri Rice, Jonathan Caouette, and Isaac Julien among hundreds more. 

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A counter-culture of new interest in filmmaking and video production emerged around the festival community. Friday nights were popularly programmed as  “Lesbian Date Nights.” MIX soon influenced other programming venues, often contributing significant work to The Whitney Biennial, Berlin International Film Festival and other important screens. 

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Hubbard and Schulman made a number of decisions that made MIX an outlier among film festivals. They prioritized artists’ fees, paying all makers equally regardless of the length of their work. They included the first focus on films by and about Black gay men in any film festival. Schulman and Hubbard worked long and hard to get press review coverage for gay experimental work, often holding individual press screenings at the critic’s convenience. During Sarah and Jim’s tenure, no one was ever turned away from MIX due to inability to pay. They hand wheat-pasted posters on buildings around the city, and leafleted areas where queer people gathered, like the piers and bars. MIX received no funding and managed to break even on enthusiastic box office support. 

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As queer community members and filmmakers began to die of complications of AIDS, Jim became active in film preservation, beginning with the film Avocada by the late Bill Vehr of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. Eventually, he preserved over 2,000 hours of AIDS Film and Video, now available for free viewing at the New York Public Library. Jim and Sarah showed gay experimental films from other countries, and personally brought queer films to venues across the US, Europe and Japan. The festival also included trans work from the very first year, with Marguerite Paris’s film All Women Are Equal. They found ways of getting works by makers like Chantal Ackerman who did not show in any other gay festivals. Among many fabulous moments in the festival’s history was MIX’s screening of Andy Warhol’s Blow Job which was attended by renowned theater actor and arts advocate Kitty Carlisle Hart, in a gown and accompanied by a tuxedo’d escort.

Hubbard & Schulman ran the festival together as a community event from 1987-1991. The 1992 festival was organized by Hubbard and filmmakers Marguerite Paris and Jerry Tartaglia. That year also introduced shows programmed by guest curators, who brought new perspectives to the line-up. Notable shows included Our Fanzine Friends, which drew upon the hot trend of queer zines, featuring work by Glenn Belverio and Bruce LaBruce; and Fire, featuring work from the African diaspora, including Dawn Suggs, Shari Frilot, Thomas Allen Harris and others.

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In 1993, Shari Frilot and Karim Ainouz became festival co-directors and introduced many changes, including the name MIX, and the production of a catalog instead of handing out program notes. They secured a new venue, moving from Anthology Film Archives to The Kitchen in Chelsea. And they made a commitment to multicultural presentations and installation work. A stunning program that year was called The 1000 Dreams of Desire, curated by Jim Lyons. It was a special show featuring Teri Rice’s The Kindling Point and Les Affaires, at the Ann Street Bookstore in Lower Manhattan, where the peep booths were reprogrammed with experimental video, and 16mm film was projected in a separate room. 

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MIX returned to Anthology in 1994, and combined with DCTV’s Lookout Lesbian & Gay Video Festival. DCTV is a long running, historic NYC organization aiming to use filmmaking as a tool to catalyze, inform, and empower communities. Their building was under renovation so they turned to Anthology.  Ainouz scaled back his involvement that year, and Frilot became the definitive voice of MIX, making the organization a home for emerging filmmakers and makers of color. 

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The emphasis on the work of queer BIPOC filmmakers was signaled by 1994’s opening feature, Brincando El Charco, and even more powerfully by 1995’s opening and closing films. These films, Vintage: Families of Value by Thomas Allen Harris, and Frilot’s own documentary Black Nations/Queer Nations, brought new audiences to MIX. These programming decisions inspired and helped launch satellite festivals such as MIX Brasil (1993) and MIX Mexico (1996). Under Frilot’s leadership. MIX made a commitment to installation work and the nascent digital realm. Installations were on view in 1993, on the upper floor of the Kitchen, and expanded in 1994, when Shu Lea Cheang and Beth Stryker curated Cyberqueer. In Cyberqueer, audience members could explore interactive installations in the basement galleries of Anthology, and participate in an online forum about “digital queerness and technoculture.”

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1996 was the festival’s 10th anniversary, and in honor of this milestone MIX presented queer work from the African diaspora at the Victoria Theater in Harlem, in addition to its downtown programs at NYU’s Cantor Film Center and the Knitting Factory. Victoria MIX was the first queer film festival to take place in Harlem, and featured work by Marlon Riggs, Isaac Julien, Maureen Blackwoods, Cheryl Dunye, Dawn Suggs, Stephen Winter, and many others. Festivities included a celebration of ballroom culture called Spread The Love, co-hosted by the House of Latex Project, plus panel discussions, and a cable television collaboration with Free Speech TV. Frilot stepped down after 1996 and went on to become chief curator of the New Frontier program at the Sundance Film Festival.

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Rajendra Roy was Festival Director in 1997, and moved the festival to Cinema Village, which was then a single-screen theater on East 12th Street. In 1997 Ernesto Foronda and Maïa Cybelle Carpenter were programming coordinators for the festival. The festival closed with a Pansy Division and Tribe 8 show at the Knitting Factory. Carpenter stayed on until 1999, also curating additional programs in the years to follow. Roy brought on Anie Stanley as artistic director in 1998, and as a team they propelled MIX to greater visibility and more corporate sponsorship. The festival in 1998 included a sidebar of 8 mm films, curated by Stephen Kent Jusick, and featuring work by both contemporary makers and old masters, such as Jack Smith, and Andy Warhol’s Polavision home movies. In 1999, MIX began to survey filmmakers who had shown at MIX to discuss the preservation of their work, calling the project Memorizing MIX.  

Rajendra Roy & Anie Stanley stepped down after the 2000 festival, and Ioannis Mookas took up the title of Executive Director. Rajendra Roy went on to be the Celeste Bartos Chief Curator of Film at The Museum of Modern Art. The MIX office was in the financial district, and was impacted with all of downtown by the events of 9/11. Mookas left after overseeing two festivals.

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MIX NYC as an organization took a new turn in 2003, when it initiated the ACT UP Oral History Project. The ACT UP Oral History Project is an archive of interviews with members of ACT UP New York. It is coordinated by Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman, with camera work by James Wentzy. The project documents effective activism that radically altered health care, medical research, and the drug approval process in the United States. With this rich and complex history available, we can better understand the complexity of making social change and better understand how to do it. This new program amplified and underscored the activist values at the heart of the organization.

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Larry Shea and Stephen Winter took the helm of the festival in 2003. Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation was shepherded into being under Winter’s supervision, and its premiere as the festival centerpiece was the beginning of its illustrious path to Cannes, the New York Film Festival, and a distribution deal with Wellspring in 2004. Shea and Winter also reimagined The 1000 Dreams of Desire program from 1993, re-staging it, with differences, at the same Ann Street location as the original. This time, in addition to the video booths and screening room on the upper floors, the basement was also cleared out, and set up with DJs, ambient 16mm & 8mm film projections, and a dance floor.

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A large-scale installation called Cake, about garment workers, by Mary Ellen Strom & Ann Carlson, debuted at South Street Seaport as the festival centerpiece. MIX expanded beyond the concept of the annual festival more in late 2004, with the introduction of MIXtv, which aired weekly on Manhattan Neighborhood Network.

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Financial challenges led Shea to move the festival from November to April 2005, skipping 2004 entirely. The opening night “happening” was held at the Gershwin Hotel, while regular screenings were at Anthology Film Archives. Jim Morrison created silk-screened T-shirts for the festival, the first time MIX had shirts since 1996. 

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MIX began a community screening program in 2005, which brought screenings to various neighborhoods and communities in the five boroughs. MIX partnered with BAAD! the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, adding film screenings to their annual BAAD! Ass Women programming, and collaborated closely with founders Charles Rice-González and Arthur Avilés to devise programs resonant with their aesthetic and audience. Eventually, further community screenings were held in all five boroughs, including but not limited to UnionDocs in Brooklyn, Collective Unconscious in Lower Manhattan, and Bent Pages bookstore in Staten Island.

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Larry Shea left MIX after the 2005 festival to devote more time to his video art, and a new team was approved by the board in the fall. The team included Andre Hereford, Szu Burgess, Kate Huh and Stephen Kent Jusick, and came in with a plan to reboot and remake MIX. Moving the festival back to its traditional November timeslot was the first decision of the new staff. 

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In 2005, a new partnership with the NYC Parks and Recreation Department launched A Different Take. Through A Different Take, young, queer, BIPOC filmmakers completed a 6-week video production workshop led by Hima B to guide their creation process. They received technical instruction and support in creating moving images and auto-biographical videos. These films were given debut screenings at the annual festival and were also screened at Le Petite Versailles Community Garden, a community garden and venue in Manhattan’s Lower East Side run by Allied Productions, Jack Waters and Peter Cramer. The name “A Different Take” referred back to a youth film production workshop run by Jack Waters around the time of the tenth MIX festival.

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In May 2006, MIX launched the Naked Eye Celebrity Camera benefit, auctioning off disposable cameras exposed by artists and celebrities including Laurie Anderson, Gus Van Sant, B.D. Wong, Alec Soth and over 100 others. The 2006 festival, the 19th, was held at the new 3LD Art & Technology Center in Lower Manhattan, and featured two screening rooms as well as window installations and an installations lounge.

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The 2007 festival began with a name change, to the New York Queer Experimental Film Festival, after requests from the public to a name more inclusive than “Lesbian and Gay” and embracing of contemporary terminology, with “MIX NYC” remaining as the name for the organization running the festival, community screenings, and all the other projects. The festival was held in an empty storefront in SoHo, and marked a significant shift away from traditional theater venues. Installations covered the area leading to the screening room, with work by Lee Krist projecting light through hanging strips of film, and a punk dyke peep show viewer installed by Niknaz Tavakolian. Many shows were packed, including the Butt magazine show, and Homoccult and other Esoterotica, guest curated by Daniel McKernan and Richie Rennt. Another highlight was a screening of a rare 16mm print shot by Women’s Liberation Cinema (Kate Millett and Susan Kleckner, among others) of the 1971 gay pride march in New York. For this screening Sharon Hayes performed a live audio accompaniment. Hayes continued working with this material, and the film and recorded audio were included in Hayes’s show at the Whitney Museum in 2012.

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In 2008 MIX took over a former Liz Claiborne department store in the South Street Seaport, filling every nook and cranny with installations, decorations and performances. The festival took place in October, earlier than its traditional mid-November dates, because the space, donated free of charge by the landlord, was only available at that time. This year MIX NYC initiated a program of artist-designed T-shirts celebrating the festival, each available in a limited edition. T-shirt designers were Diego Montoya & Nickolas Bullock, it/EQ Carlo Quispe & Ethan Shoshan, PolyVestedRelics (PVR), and Kate Huh & Ginger Brooks Takahashi.

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Starting with the staff changes and festival reboot in 2006, MIX NYC organizational leadership had been executive director Stephen Kent Jusick, with co-directors Szu Burgess, Andre Hereford, and Kate Huh. Both Andre and Kate left after the 2008 festival. After serving two years on the programming committee, August Eckhardt stepped in as co-director in 2009. August was credited under their pen name Rocko Bulldagger and later as Sloan Lesbowitz. As of the 2009 festival, Szu and August were co-directors and Stephen was executive director, and this team would remain in place for the following six years, with August later shifting roles to president of the board in 2013.

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The 2009 festival took place in Chelsea for the first time since 1993, this time in an 7,000-square-foot empty storefront of a newly constructed condo building. The venue’s ceiling to floor glass windows gave MIX unprecedented street visibility, including projections by Lori Hiris and Kadet Kuhne. Installations were prominent again, most notably a large geodesic dome that was Wildflowers of Manitoba, by Luis Jacob and Noam Gonick. A live actor inhabited the dome, silently lying there, listening to records, lighting incense and ruminating, while 3 projections illuminated some of the panels with scenes of a same-sex love and commitment. The closing night feature Maggots & Men, by Cary Cronenwett, was sold out, as were several other shows. The festival suffered some noise complaints from condo residents above, who felt that festival-goers were too loud.

The 2010 festival was held at Theater for the New City, in the East Village. After three years in makeshift screening rooms, the films were again shown in a theater setting. The physical space became an essential element of the festival experience in the hands of venue designer Diego Montoya and installation coordinator Andre Azevedo. Using three theater spaces in the TNC complex, MIX emphasized an immersive environment with geometric string art design. One smaller theater contained a performative installation by Daniel Pillis. Another theater was turned into an installation lounge, anchored by Blaise Garber-Paul’s Queer Fruit Tree, which grew and changed throughout the week, and under which visitors could sit on astroturf, or on conical black cushions. The closing night film was Bruce LaBruce’s L.A. Zombie, which sold out. L.A. Zombie had been censored and removed from the Melbourne International Film Festival, so MIX NYC was happy to add a second screening to ensure more queer horror fans could see this non-narrative, surreal, sexually explicit film.

In 2011 MIX took over a disused theater on Bleecker Street. The festival trailer, made on 16mm film by Joey Carducci, was projected on a continuous loop onto the building across the street, above the subway entrance. The venue design told a story of sorts. The lobby was dark with back-lit curtains that gave the impression of being in outer space. From there visitors could enter the screening room, or venture through a lush psychedelic forest, and down steps to a subterranean space cave made of pink paper mache and pointy pink pillows. This downstairs space was a lounge, had a second stage used for performances, and contained most of the installations. The Occupy Wall Street movement was going on at the same time, and the NYPD raided Zuccotti Park just before the festival opened. As a result, MIX made the decision to open the venue as a sanctuary for queer Occupiers.

While the festival and Occupy were culminating, Jim Hubbard finished his documentary, United in Anger: A History of ACT UP, featuring interview footage from the ACT UP Oral History Project and from the planning stages and execution of historic actions like Stop the Church, a 1989 demonstration protesting the homophobic and misogynist anti-abortion and anti-gay policies of the Catholuc Church. Hubbard and Schulman traveled with the film, bringing it to audiences in Haifa, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv, and turning down large institutional venues funded by the state of Israel and prioritizing small art galleries and people-run collectives.

The 25th MIX Festival took place in 2012 in a two-story 20,000 square foot former nut roasting factory in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn, the first time the festival had been held outside Manhattan. The move coincided with Hurricane Sandy flooding and temporarily cutting off power to lower Manhattan, where the MIX office was located. The first floor of the Brooklyn venue was a wide-open space that contained many installations, as well as a small performance stage and lounge areas. An interior design of spandex “explosions” filled the space, often running from ceiling to floor. The second floor, regrettably accessible only by a steep staircase, held the screening room, as well as 2 restrooms and administrative space. J Dellecave’s Nocturnal Beaver was a 5-day endurance installation evoking queer and trans collaborative work projects and the unique disruption to flow that beaver dams create. The performance incorporated items left in the festival space either intentionally or incidentally, intervening overnight with a literal and figurative evocation of beaver. This auspicious year also marked the initial collaboration with Bay Area curators Queer Rebels K.B. Boyce and Celeste Chan, whose film programs found synergy with the MIX curatorial vision, engaged a new audience from their deep roots in NYC’s queer BIPOC community, and became an annual fixture at the festival for following years. The closing night film was She Said Boom, about the Toronto Homocore band Fifth Column, with band member Caroline Azar in attendance. Caroline gave away priceless Homocore memorabilia to eager punk rock queers in the packed closing night audience.

After the community’s enthusiastic response to the Brooklyn warehouse setting and autonomous queer art zone vibe, the festival returned to Brooklyn in 2013. This venue was a 25,000 square foot warehouse, which gave over about 15,000 square feet to installation work, and 3600 square foot screening room. The festival’s visual theme was body parts, and a giant inflatable lung, which breathed slightly, greeted festival-goers as they entered. There were other inflatables, including Rachel Shannon’s Breastival Vestibules, and other plastics that resembled veins. Jonathan Caouette returned to the festival with a new film that he finished just hours before the screening at MIX NYC. Sasha Wortzel’s Eight Bells: Elegy for a Forgotten Sailor sound installation invited audience members to listen to memories of seafaring women and cross-dressing sailors, reinterpreted and recorded from archival texts. Closing night was Clement Hil Goldberg’s Valencia, the Movies, a large-scale adaptation of the novel by Michelle Tea, with different directors and actors independently interpreting each individual chapter as its own short film, to be screened together. The NYC debut sold out, so an extra screening was added. Every chair in the venue was brought into the screening room in an effort to accommodate an impatient yet dedicated queer audience, which included many of the directors and actors and artists involved in the expansive production.

By 2014, the festival was at home in Brooklyn and the main venue was the MIX Hive, a warehouse on Butler Street. Screenings and performances were also held at BAX, the Brooklyn Arts Exchange, and UnionDocs, Center for Documentary Art. The queer erotic body in public was a major theme for the 2014 festival, which included a guest curated sex positive program by Shine Louise Houston; a film by Sins Invalid, the renowned disability justice performance project; and the East Coast premier of Un(dis)sing Our Abilities, a program of shorts curated by Lisa Ganser and Lorin Murphy of Periwinkle Cinema. Age of Consent by Charles Lum and Todd Verow took a deep and explicit dive into queer sexual culture by documenting the history of the Hoist, a London leather bar.

While the popularity of the festival and after parties continued to grow exponentially, financial challenges persisted. In 2015, Executive Director Jusick secured the largest venue yet, in an industrial neighborhood in south Brooklyn. Both budget and environmental concerns led to the difficult decision to not publish a catalog for the 28th festival. MIX catalogs had evolved into works of art in themselves, with some of the favorite designs by Sasha O’Malley in 2010 through 2013, and theory f practice in 2014. The 2015 festival included a special screening of Barbara Hammer’s film Nitrate Kisses, with free tickets for audience members born in or after its premier in 1992. The long running, all-volunteer operated kitchen had expanded to serving full meals. DJ sets sometimes began before the end of the final screening, all of which was emblematic of the competing priorities brewing within the organization.

The rapid growth of the audience and afterparties proved unsustainable for the volunteer staff. Budget concerns and internal disagreements grew almost as fast as audience size. Expenses outpaced fundraising, and brought the organization to something of a standstill. Board president August Eckhardt recruited three new board members to make changes and then stepped down. Issues and concerns were voiced at a community town hall, and the accumulating challenges lead to major turn-over and restructuring. Stephen Kent Jusick and Szu Burgess both resigned in 2016. During the course of this ambitious era, the festival had moved out of theaters and into warehouse spaces and expanded the scope and size of screenings, performances, dance parties, installations, food, and more. It had become both larger and more underground, committed to its outsider ethos and cutting edge films, and as much an immersive queer experience as it was a film festival.

While undergoing internal transformations, MIX festivals were still held in 2017 and 2018 at the Dreamhouse, a transformed old catering hall in North Brooklyn. The organization was steered by long time MIX staff member Devon Gallegos, with Flayr Poppins serving as Festival and Outreach Director for the 30th anniversary of the festival. Highlights included the film Kairos Dirt & the Errant Vacuum by Madsen Minax, and bizzy barefoot’s installation Monuments, which questioned the individualism so often emphasized by acts of memorialization.

2019 saw an abbreviated MIX Fest at Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan, hosted by the Board of Directors. Showcase screenings of prior work were used to raise money and awareness and to keep MIX NYC going. Board members, including Niknaz Tavakolian, were determined to sustain the organization, and their persistence helped make the current revival possible.

Fresh from the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2024, queer artists and activists Blake Pruitt and Alex Smith approached Stephen Winter about reviving MIX NYC. Initial inquiries and feelers from Jim Hubbard received an enthusiastic response, and after a few dormant years, a new committee-based organization has emerged to bring MIX back. Today, the new organization is hosting One-Night Stands, a series of experimental film screenings aimed at reviving the festival for November 2024 and once again fostering a community space and art world platform for queer experimental film.

MIX History as told to, researched, and remembered by August Eckhardt, 2024