Three years into its youthful tenure, Salt Lake City’s
Queer Spectra Arts Festival has danced, swayed and spoken to the strange shifts of our world in more ways than the originators had imagined. Begun by modern dance graduates
Dat Nguyen and
Max Barnewitz and
Aileen Norris, the collective decided that an interdisciplinary space for artists was the next step. Thus, the festival was born, bringing together queer-identified artists from muti-disciplines including dance, performance art, visual art and spoken word among others. “We felt that we needed to be directly in conversation with other art forms,” Sargent says. “We got excited about breaking down the silos between arts communities.” This originating conversion occurred in January 2019, and by May of that year, the first