Svetlana Kitto

Photo by David Yarritu

NYC-based Svetlana Kitto is a mad multi-hyphenate of all things oral history, art writing, creative nonfiction, and editing. She’s combined a few of those interests, specializing in artist oral history. She even interviewed the late and great lesbian icon Barbara Hammer for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Her queerness is integral to how she lives her life. “Being gay is the gift that keeps on giving,” she says. “I don’t ever want to get complacent in my understanding of sexuality and gender. [I am] always looking to be destabilized, and knocked down again, like I did when I first embraced my queerness.” She recently wrote about this in an essay for Off Assignment called “What the Most Sordid Russian Gay Bar in Riga Taught Me About Identity Politics.” Other work can be found in the Cut, Interview, and Guernica. Much of her work is rooted in collaboration, most of the time with friends or people in her community. She’s currently got her hands in multiple creative pots. She is editor of the first annual BOFFO art journal, with art and writings by Wolfgang Tillmans, Lyle Ashton Harris, Julie Tolentino, and many more. She’s also working on a MacArthur Foundation–funded oral history project about campaigns for reproductive rights in the Global South. She’s worked with many organizations and institutions on oral history projects, including the Museum of Arts and Design, the New York Public Library of Performing Arts, and the Brooklyn Historical Society, where she most recently did interviews for the Muslims in Brooklyn Public History Project. Fully entrenched in the queer community, she is also constantly thinking about how “sometimes we get very narrow in our thinking around issues that pertain to ‘us,”’ she says. “[It is] important to remember that ‘us’ contains multitudes, that is to say, many genders, bodies, identities.” —AE