Halo Starling (they/he) is a writer, director, performer, and artist, worldbuilding positive futures in the husk of the capitalist experiment. As a trans and queer immigrant with invisible disabilities, Starling's multi-hyphenate work in film, TV, video and performance explores what it means to be trapped inside of structures that are meant to help you. Starling envisions ways out by building worlds where marginalized people find more resources to fully thrive. Their work asks their audience to consider: how do we collectively find our way to a positive future?

It is no coincidence that the most recent crises faced by democracy and empire have been accompanied by a dramatic increase in queer and trans visibility in the visual arts. The continued success of major entertainers like Laverne Cox and RuPaul and “art world” stars like Wu Tsang and Tourmaline in troubling the gender binary—a source of so much pain and oppression—offers new ways of being precisely at a moment of global upheaval. As a person walking the slippage between binaries, I have often found that my work—evolving from drawing, painting, and sculpture to video, performance, and plays, and finally now to film and television—defies easy categorization. However, I also have a desire to be made legible and to touch a larger public—especially of other queer and trans/non-binary individuals—with my work, which has led me to codify my art into increasingly mainstream forms. The challenge for myself and my peers is to preserve the queer wildness of our work—the intricacies of queer and trans life that are so unintelligible to the cisgender, heterosexual majority that often sets the boundaries of what is considered “mainstream”—while accessing the resources, and the recognition, necessary for such work. In the process, we are creating a New Trans Cinema.