Dandy Style - Trans Takeover!

Wednesday 16 November, 7pm

Manchester City Art Gallery, Mosley St, Manchester M2 3JL.

E-J Scott, Curator of the Museum of Transology, cultural producer and dress historian will lead a tour of this major, new exhibition at Manchester City Art Gallery from a trans and non-binary perspective. The tour will be followed by a panel discussion featuring Krishna Ishta (writer Sex Education) Libro Bridgeman (Hot Pencil Press) and Orlando (performer and dandy) talking identity and discussing the looks that have informed who they have become today.
Dandy Style focuses on men’s fashion and image from the 18th century to the present day. The show explores how concepts such as elegance, uniformity and spectacle have evolved over the last 250 years.

  • For E-J Scott’s first ever voluntary role at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery he mounted men’s Regency costume for the Dress for Excess exhibition at the Brighton Royal Pavilion. He went on to care for 14,000 pieces of dress and textiles for the National Trust as Assistant Fashion Curator at Killerton House, Exeter.

    When not examining fashionable material culture, E-J’s commitment to community work focusses on co-curatorial practices that enable marginalised and misrepresented communities to rewrite their place in the museum. He is the founder of the British Digital Art Network (Tate/Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art) and the Museum of Transology.

  • is a London-based screenwriter, comedian, performance artist and theatre maker. They make socially conscious, form-pushing works about taboo or underrepresented experiences of gender, race and sexual politics.

    Currently, they are writing on SEX EDUCATION (Netflix, S4) and is a Barbican Centre Open Lab artist (2022). More recently, they co-directed Jazz and Dice by Naked Productions for BBC Radio 4, was an Arts Admin Bursary Artist (2020-21), and came Runner-Up on Screenshot (a competition for comedy writer-performers hosted by Sister Pictures and South of the River Pictures - judged by Olivia Coleman, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Lolly Adefope & Rosie Jones).

  • trained at E.15 Drama school and toured with several new writing theatre companies before turning to writing full time. They wrote and performed in The Butch Monologues 2012-2022 travelling to New York (Abron Arts Centre, La Mama,) Australia Theatre Works, Sydney Arts Centre, and Belfast Black Box. Libro Levi has a Ph.D from UEA in Creative and Critical Writing where they were awarded the HSC Scholarship. Libro Levi co-runs hotpencil press with Serge Nicholson publications include: There Is No Word For It (2011), The Butch Monologues (2017), and Letter To My Little Queer Self (2021). Libro Levi is currently working on screen and TV plays.

  • is the drag king persona of Holly James Johnston, a writer and educator currently reading for a DPhil in English at the University of Oxford. As Orlando, Holly melds masculinities and femininities together through lip-sync and dance, and has worked with national organisations such as Tate, The National Gallery, and the V&A. Orlando initially emerged out of Holly's research focus on historical and literary queer lives. Since then, however, he has begun to take on a life of his own. Once Orlando is out of the closet and on the stage he very much rules the roost. If Orlando is the star, Holly is his manager, securing his bookings and steaming his outfits...

    Photo credit to Light By Dan.