Sasha Velour

Critically acclaimed gender-fluid drag queen, visual artist, speaker, illustrator, and author Sasha Velour has been a force in the international drag scene long before her scene-stealing, rose-petal-filled win on season nine of the Emmy Award-winning RuPaul’s Drag Race.

In April 2023, she published her first book, The Big Reveal: An Illustrated Manifesto of Drag (Harper) which was heralded as “a rousing tribute to a revolutionary art form and its practitioners” (Publisher’s Weekly). A first-of-its-kind book, Velour’s work thoughtfully weaves memoir, history, and theory into a living portrait of an artist and an art form, illuminating drag as a unique form of expression with a rich history. Sasha Velour’s The Big Reveal Live Show! a new stage work created in connection to the book, toured to sold-out houses in the US and Canada, and continues to tour internationally.

Velour is one of the new hosts for the fourth season the Peabody and Emmy-Award winning television show We’re Here, on HBO. Velour was also recently commissioned by the Tony Award-winning Tectonic Theatre Project to star in and co-create (alongside legendary director Moises Kaufman) a new theatrical work which will premiere at La Jolla Playhouse in 2024.

Velour’s first one-queen drag show Smoke & Mirrors was called a “spell-binding tour de force” (Forbes) and bewitched audiences and critics alike, touring from 2019-2022 to over 80 cities around the world including sold-out performances at the London Palladium, Paris’ Folies Bergère, and theaters in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Vancouver, Auckland, Warsaw, and more. Her acclaimed NYC drag show NightGowns, founded in 2015, has hosted some of the world’s greatest drag performers and was adapted into a docu-series directed by Sophie Muller and The Documentary Group in 2020. NightGowns recently completed a sold-out residency at Manhattan’s Le Poisson Rouge resumed performances in January 2024.