12 Gates Arts is pleased to present Queer Short Films and Stories, an evening dedicated to showcasing the work of emerging and established queer BIPOC artists that were selected through 12G’s recent open call.
Through film and written word, the featured works explore identity, memory, intimacy, and resistance offering nuanced reflections on the queer experience across a range of cultural and personal contexts.
This year’s featured artists are:
Sharon George for her short story: Not Too Interesting
Nikita Shah / Lawhore Vagistan for their short film: Sari, Not Sorry
Nae Vallejo for their short story: The Staying Kind
Sushma Khadepaun for their short film: Places I’ve Called My Own
Lunise Cerin for their short film: Close-Up
Each artist brings a distinct voice and vision to the program, collectively creating a space for dialogue, visibility, and imagination.
The event is free and open to the public. We invite you to join us in celebrating these powerful contributions to queer storytelling.
Sharon George is a lawyer and writer based in Philadelphia. Her work focuses on labor, gender, and how we relate to each other.
Excerpt from Not Too Interesting:
“My body was made of flat planes hidden under free cotton t-shirts. A middle class child of corn. People used to ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up and I’d say an astronaut, because that’s what children said in public access sitcoms. My honest answer was that I wanted to go out to parties and be really sexy in tiny clothes, dance on tables and pull scandalized men into bathrooms.”
IG: @sharong.jpg
Nikita Shah and LaWhore Vagistan bring together fashion, performance, and cultural theory to reimagine the sari as a dynamic form shaped by gender, identity, and tradition. Shah, born in Mumbai and based in New York, is a textile artist and fashion designer focused on sustainable practices and South Asian handcrafted traditions. Her work rethinks the sari beyond its conventional uses, integrating contemporary design with historical craft. Vagistan uses drag to examine queer South Asian identity, gender performance, and diaspora. She is also a professor and author whose research centers on performance and cultural politics. Together, Shah and Vagistan create collaborative works that combine design, performance, and critical inquiry to challenge fixed ideas of clothing, gender expression, and cultural heritage.
IG (LaWhore): @lawhorevagistan
IG (Nikita): @nikita.untitle
Website: https://www.sari-notsorry.com/
“Sari, Not Sorry marks the directorial debut of fashion designer and textile artist Nikita Shah, in collaboration with drag artist LaWhore Vagistan. Together, they explore the sari as a site of performance, identity, and cultural resistance. Set in New York City, the film follows LaWhore through moments of nightlife, photo shoots, and daily rituals. Each framed by handcrafted Indian textiles.
What began as a costuming collaboration evolved into a deeper dialogue between textile history and queer performance. Shah, whose work centers India’s textile traditions and sustainable craft, sought to reimagine the sari beyond nostalgia and hyper-femininity. Her partnership with LaWhore bridges design, drag, and academic inquiry.
Together, they examine how the sari can move fluidly between tradition and experimentation, everyday wear and stage costume. With contributions from stylists Pranay Jaitly, Shounak Amonkar, and drape artist Nikkatya, Sari, Not Sorry weaves fashion, theory, and performance into a layered narrative.
The film positions the sari not just as clothing, but as archive, language, and embodied memory, raising questions about how we carry culture and identity through what we wear.”
Nae Vallejo (they/he) is a Black, disabled, AuDHD, HoH, queer-trans experiential archivist, and service animal guardian living in Philadelphia. Their work lives at the intersection of storytelling, accessibility, and transformation—centering the textures of disabled, Black, queer life not as spectacle, but as sacred. He is the creator behind naeborhood projects, a mycelial offering of grief, care, and color—a space where tenderness and access take shape in tangible form. Through writing, visual art, and memory-work, nae explores what it means to stay, to become, and to be seen.
Nae’s Artist Statement:
“The Staying Kind” is a soft offering—stitched from memory, imagination, grief, and love. It asks what it means to become real—not in the shiny, polished sense, but in the raw, tender way that comes from being deeply seen and held.
This story draws inspiration from The Velveteen Rabbit, especially the Skin Horse’s wisdom: that realness is born from love. That once you are real, you don’t mind being hurt. But as someone who has moved through trauma, gender journeys, disability, and healing, I wanted to offer complexity to that idea. In this piece, becoming real is not just about being loved—it’s about staying. Staying with your softness, your wounds, your chosen family. Staying with the parts of yourself you once buried.
At the heart of the story is a relationship shaped by chosen closeness and deep care. The narrator—like me—is neurodivergent, trans, and hard of hearing, in quiet relationship with the moon. Their journey mirrors my own: learning to be loved by someone who didn’t try to fix me, but stayed. Someone who helped me become more myself, simply by showing up again and again.
The stuffed horse in the story is named Cariño, Spanish for “darling” or “sweetheart,” to honor the quiet tenderness we often carry alone. This story is my archival love letter to those of us who glow softly in the dark, who hold onto sweetness like a thread. To papá. Como la luna.
As with all my work, this piece is a practice in collective care and accessible storytelling. It’s a reminder that becoming real is messy, nonlinear, and full of quiet magic. And it’s about the moon. Always the moon.
Thank you for reading. Thank you for staying.”
Sushma Khadepaun is an Indian-born writer and director based in New York City. Her stories often explore ideas of home and identity. She was a Screenwriting Resident at Yaddo in 2024, a Fellow at the Film at Lincoln Center’s Artist Academy in 2023 and was listed as one of Filmmaker Magazine‘s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2021. Her work has been supported by SFFilm, the Sundance Institute, Film Independent, the Gotham, CNC (Paris) and NFDC (India).
IG: @sush.anon
Website: https://www.sushmak.com/
Shushma’s Artist Statement:
“Places I’ve Called My Own is a portrait of a queer woman who returns to Mumbai from the US for her father's funeral. As the shadow of patriarchy still looms in the family, she must confront the ghosts of her past in order to move forward. This film is in part an aching reality; in part a fantasy of living one's life openly in places they’ve called their own.
In this time of great instability and threat for LGBTQ+ lives all over the world, and especially in the US, nuanced portraits of queer and immigrant lives are most needed. In dark times, I believe it's important to dream. To be aware of the cruelty of reality and dream in spite of it.”
Lunise Cerin is a Writer, Director, Editor, and Story Producer from Port-au-Prince and Philadelphia. Cerin began her film career in Los Angeles at SVOD Black and Sexy TV, where she worked for seven years as a writer, director, editor, and producer across multiple seasons of web series produced by the network. In 2018, she moved back to Haiti and began working as a feature documentary editor and story producer. Cerin received an MFA in screenwriting from Columbia University in 2024. Cerin is currently in post-production for her directorial debut, the documentary film "Miwa".
IG: @tinabelike