Black August Queer Film Festival at Pillsbury Creative Commons
Sunday, August 31, 2025 | 12–6 PM
Pillsbury Creative Commons | 3501 Chicago Ave S, Minneapolis
A Day of Film, Performance, and Liberation
The Black August Queer Film Festival (BAQFF) is the first major public event in our new Pillsbury Creative Commons, and we’re proud to share it with you.
Black August is a month of remembrance, resistance, and reflection. It is a time to honor Black freedom fighters, political prisoners, and cultural workers whose legacies shape movements for liberation today. This festival draws from that lineage, highlighting Black queer filmmakers whose work challenges, heals, and imagines new futures.
What to Expect
Free screenings of short films, web series, and features
Live performances by the featured filmmakers and artists
Community fair with food, local vendors, and organizations supporting wellness, justice, and education
Q&A sessions with the filmmakers, moderated by writer and curator Valerie Deus
Curated by
Danez Smith – Poet, performer, and curator
Co-Produced by Tish Jones – Artist and activist
Schedule
12:00pm – Welcome/Invocation and Opening Performances
1:00pm – Love is Like – Ibimina Dominque Thompson,
How to Witness a Miracle – Ajanaé Dawkins and Matthew Piits
2:30pm – Sweetness of Wild – Free Black Dirt (Erin Sharkey and Juanada Petrus)
Erotics of Abolition – Juanada Petrus
3:30pm – All My Niggas Surround me,
And I’m Surrounded by All My Niggas – Jai
4:30pm – Community Conversation on Art, Queerness,
and Abolition with Valerie Déus and Danez Smith
Featured Artists
Erin Sharkey
Erin Sharkey is a writer, arts and abolition organizer, cultural worker, and film producer based in Minneapolis. Sharkey edited the anthology, A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars, published by Milkweed Editions. She has an MFA in creative writing from Hamline University. She is the producer of film projects, including Sweetness of Wild, an episodic web film project, and Small Business Revolution (Hulu), which explored challenges and opportunities for Black-owned businesses in the Twin Cities in the summer of 2021. Erin teaches at Minneapolis College and with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop (MPWW)/ReEntry Lab. She has received fellowships and residencies from the Loft Mentor Series, VONA/Voices, the Givens Foundation, Coffee House Press, the Bell Museum of Natural History, the Jerome Foundation, and the Black Seed Fellowship from Black Visions and the Headwaters Foundation. Sharkey is a steward cooperative member of the Fields at Rootsprings Retreat, a land-based Cooperative stewarding space for the healing and development of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) artists, activists, healers, and community centering Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Queer (LGBTQ) folx in Central Minnesota.
Ajanaé Dawkins
Ajanaé Dawkins is a poet, conceptual artist and theologian raised between. She works through poetry, visual art, performance, and audio to explore the politics of faith, grief, and intimate relationships between Black women. As a theologian, she blends cultural criticism, memoir, and theology as autotheory to consider the relationship between Black church history, spirituality, and creation. Her work has appeared in Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, and more. Her exhibition, No One Teaches Us How To Be Daughters, debuted at Urban Arts Space in 2024. Her chapbook, BLOOD-FLEX, won the New Delta Review prize. Ajanaé is an Elizabeth George Grant Recipient and Writing Freedom Fellow. She was the Taft Museum’s 2022 Duncanson Artist in Residence and Ohio State University’s 2024 UAS Community Artist in Residence. She is a fellow of Torch Literary, The Watering Hole, and Pink Door. She co-hosts the VS Podcast with Brittany Rogers at the Poetry Foundation.
Junauda Petrus
Junauda Petrus is an abolitionist, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, runaway witch and soul sweetener of Black Trinidadian and Crucian descent, born on Dakota/Anishinaabe land (Minneapolis). Her work blends poetics, research, play, and ancestral dreaming to envision liberated futures grounded in sweetness, healing, and the sacred.
Her debut novel, The Stars and The Blackness Between Them, earned a Coretta Scott King Honor and was named a Best Book by Kirkus Reviews, YALSA, and the ALA Rainbow List. Her children’s book, Can We Please Give The Police Department to the Grandmothers? (2023), was a Minnesota Book Award Finalist, imagining a world led by grandmotherly wisdom and abolitionist care. Her writing also appears in anthologies like Pleasure Activism and Tasting Light.
She wrote and directed There Are Other Worlds (2015), a poetic circus-play exploring incarceration and Black mother-daughter love, and wrote Impact Theory of Mass Extinction (2022), which followed Black queer teens into a mystical dinosaur portal in South Minneapolis. In 2021, she was the librettist for The Cartography Project at the Kennedy Center, writing about George Floyd and Minneapolis.
As a filmmaker, her work includes the web series Sweetness of Wild (2018), a documentary on the Parable of the Sower opera and Toshi Reagon for St. Catherine’s University (2019), Erotics of Abolition (2020) which centers the embodied undoing of policing and the erotic as a site of Black liberation. Petrus is the 2025–2026 Minneapolis poet laureate.
Ibimina Dominique Thompson
Ibimina Dominique Thompson is a multi-hyphenate artist based in the Midwest. She creates work that centers Black transness and looks to remove a fictional veil of Maya created by whiteness on art. They were recently recognized among “Theater workers to watch” by American Theater magazine.
SPECIAL THANKS TO MY FRIENDS, AND FAMILY (CHOSEN AND BLOOD) FOR BRINGING ME THUS FAR.
Previous credits: Guthrie theater (little Prince), artistry theater (Godspell/ 25th annual Putnam county spelling bee), theater latté da (twelve angry men (world premiere)), underdog theater company x mixed blood (how it’s gon be (world premiere)), gremlin theater (samuel j and k), pillsbury House + Theater (close to home (world premiere)).
Film : love is like (North Carolina black film festival, cinè filmu festival, giants exhibit @ MIA, Walker Art Center)
Solo performance : bad Africans a guide to being oshey and bardest in a f*cked up world ( Walker Art Center, Weismann Art Museum)
Matthew (Mathias) Pitts
Matthew (Mathias) Pitts Is a Poet, Performer, Filmmaker and Photographer from Columbus who uses humor and myth to fantasize the mundane especially in a black lens. By accessing collective memory using his unique method of storytelling, Mathias is able to form a layer of familiarity to commonly unifying black experiences through poetry, photography and film. Outside of the multiple placements from Today.com, and Poets.org, he has had his photography placed in an exhibit with Urban Arts Space for Portable Paradise as well as over 100 publications both domestically and internationally. His short film work has been in multiple exhibitions such as Vessels in Red as well as in the Galaxy Film Festival.
Jai
Jai is a filmmaker, poet, and visual artist. They identify as trans, queer, non-binary and a second generation immigrant from Haiti and Jamaica.Their work doesn’t aim to be original as much as it aims to keep nothing hidden. In unveiling the idiosyncrasies of gender, race, spirituality and love, their work becomes a light for other queer bodies and a mirror that implores any audience to look at themselves in ways that are not always comfortable.
Join Us
This day of cinema, performance, and community is part of our 2025 Makers Series. We invite you to experience these stories and conversations in the spirit of Black August—radical, tender, and deeply alive.