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Mykki Blanco        

Transgender Activist, Rapper & Performance Artist

Mykki Blanco, an American rapper, performance artist, poet, and activist, released her debut album "Mykki" (produced by Woodkid and Jermiah Meece) in September 2016 on her Dogfood Music Group imprint via !K7 Music. This album was just one of many works in Blanco's extensive discography, which also includes the EPs "Mykki Blanco & the Mutant Angels" and "Betty Rubble: The Initiation," along with the mixtape "Cosmic Angel: The Illuminati Prince/ss."

Over the years, Blanco has lived many lives and undergone many transformations. Before her music career took off, Blanco was a child actor and founder of a performance art collective, which won an Indies Spirit Award. She also won scholarships to two prestigious art colleges, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago being one of them, though she opted to drop out after two semesters. Blanco's literary prowess is also notable, as demonstrated by her book of poetry, "From the Silence of Duchamp to the Noise of Boys," published in 2011.

Blanco first gained prominence as a force to be reckoned with in the noise rap realm. What initially started as a video art project about a “teenage drag rapper” transformed into two years of Blanco personally-identifying and living as a transgender woman. Today, Blanco identifies as transgender and uses she or they pronouns. She began hormone therapy for her gender transition in 2019. Blanco's openness about being HIV positive since 2011, which she revealed on her Facebook page in June 2015, has also contributed to destigmatizing the condition in the rap industry.

Having collaborated with renowned artists like Kanye West, Teyana Taylor, Blood Orange, and more, Blanco's influence in the music scene is far-reaching. Her work includes celebrated music videos for songs such as "Join My Militia," "Head Is a Stone," "Wavvy," and a track with Kanye West, "Bye Bye Baby," for West's scrapped album "Yandhi." Blanco's latest albums include "Broken Hearts & Beauty Sleep," released in 2021, and "Stay Close to Music," released in 2022.

Outside of her musical career, Blanco is also a social activist. In November 2023, she took a stand by signing an open letter calling for a ceasefire in the 2023 Israel–Hamas war and an end to Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip. Blanco's fearless persona is not just limited to her music and activism, but it is also reflected in her unique spiritual identity marked by tattoos of a Christian cross and a Star of David, showcasing her complex and evolving relationship to faith.

Speech Topics

MYKKI BLANCO: THE WORLDS I INHABIT

Artist Michael David Quattlebaum Jr. (aka Mykki Blanco), tells the autobiographical story of his origins. A child actor, poet, teenage prostitute, performance artist, and musician, Quattlebaum is an activist and one of the only vocal HIV-positive entertainers in the world. Interweaving stories of personal failures and career triumphs, laying bare the realities of racism, homophobia, abuse, and sexual trauma that would be critical pillars of his creative practice as well the artist’s exploration of their gender identity we learn the making and unmaking of Mykki Blanco. In “The Worlds I Inhabit” we learn about Quattlebaum’s journey of finding a place within the mainstream music and entertainment industry as a “gender outlaw” and the careerist strategies that would allow an unknown underground art freak to become an international musical performing artist. In “The Worlds I Inhabit”, Mykki Blanco speaks of his lived experience as an artist/writer/performer who inhabits many worlds both intersectionally and professionally and presents the lecture as appropriately as the artist could, as a performance. Chronological and stream of consciousness, lyrical and factual, Mykki Blanco invites you into the many varied, very much alive and evolving story of his life and creative practice.

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