Bo Rittapa* (pronouns: he/him/his) is an interdisciplinary scholar-artist whose work spans across the mediums of visual art, comics, performance, filmmaking, writing, and culinary business. By utilizing queerness and gender-nonconformity as frameworks of resistance to the romanticized, cisheteronormative narratives of race, immigration, and belonging, Bo’s interdisciplinary body of work reckons with the complexity of intersectional struggles, imagines possibilities of desire and representation beyond capitalistic relational confines, and cultivates accomplices horizontally across experiences.

As an educator and cultural worker, Bo uses critical thinking as a means to situate creative practices and draws upon embodiment and relationality as a source of scholarship. He honors marginality as a space through which to strategically and sustainably envision liberation and nurtures vulnerability as a sanctuary of compassion and accountability. In working against the grain institutionally, artistically, and interpersonally, Bo challenges the politics of respectability and colonization by queering individualistic notions of authorship, singular narratives of cultural authenticity, and capitalistically defined boundaries of existence.

Bo is currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

*Last name pronounced RIT-ta-paa

 

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