Sasha Velour is a gender-fluid drag queen known for her performance artistry, fierce activism, and boundary-breaking scholarship. Sasha is the founder and director of the acclaimed New York City drag revue NightGowns. Her first one-queen show, Smoke & Mirrors, toured to 90 theaters around the world from 2019-2022, including the Folies Bergere and the London Palladium. Her best-selling book The Big Reveal: An Illustrated Manifest of Drag outlined the untold history of drag alongside her own life (Harper, 2023). She is currently on tour with a stage show of the same name and the show will be at Proctors in Schenectady, New York on March 2.
In 2017, she won the 9th season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, the year the show won its first Emmy. In 2020, she executive produced and starred in a docuseries adaptation of her show NightGowns, which won a RealScreen Award. In 2023, she joined the cast of HBO’s We’re Here, and produced drag events in Tennessee and Oklahoma (Season 4 Coming Soon). In Summer 2024, Sasha will debut her newest theater piece with the Tony Award-winning Tectonic Theater Project and director Moises Kaufman.
As an illustrator and designer, she has produced several comic books, including a series about the Stonewall uprising (2012-2019) and an anthology of drag called Velour (2013-2018). She created the Google Doodle for Marlene Dietrich in 2018, and drew a self-portrait for the cover of The New Yorker Magazine in 2023.
