Jas Lin, queerness is not yet here, 2025 (performance view). Produced by BOFFO Performance Festival Fire Island 2025: Dystopian Ecstasy, Fire Island Pines, July 12–13, 2025. Courtesy BOFFO, New York and Nir Arieli. Photo: Nir Areli

Through summer artist residencies and an annual performance festival, BOFFO supports experimental art and design with a focus on queer and BIPOC communities. Founded in 2009 and located within the Fire Island National Seashore, BOFFO has reclaimed the island as a space for queer experimentation while confronting its legacy of racial and economic exclusion. In 2014, BOFFO’s co-founder Faris Al-Shathir launched the annual Performance Festival in Fire Island Pines, which commissions six to ten new works each summer activating beaches, boardwalks, and dunes through live, site-specific performance. Al-Shathir develops the conceptual and infrastructural framework of each iteration in collaboration with curators such as Sydney Fishman and Lucas Ondak.

BOFFO’s Performance Festival functions as a site of experimentation and community building while engaging Fire Island’s geography, history, and queer cultural legacy. Performances move between indoor and outdoor spaces, dissolving the boundary between public and private, and inviting audiences to collectively process grief, absurdity, and joy. 

BOFFO Residency Fire Island is located in the restored Carrington Cottage in Cherry Grove and aims to nurture artistic practices while enriching the Pines community by adding new and diverse perspectives to its cultural heritage. Artists are invited for a one to four-week stay, at the end of which they present work to the community. 

Jesús Hilario-Reyes, Retinal Burning, 2024 (performance view). Co-created with Br0nze Age. Produced by BOFFO Performance Festival Fire Island 2024, Fire Island Pines, July 27–28, 2024. Courtesy BOFFO, New York and Krys Fox. Photo: Krys Fox

Faris Saad Al-Shathir is an Iraqi-American director and designer based in New York City. Al-Shathir holds an M.Arch from the University of Pennsylvania and a BA from Rhodes College. As Co-Founder, Executive Director & Artistic Director, he oversees all aspects of BOFFO’s work, including the summer residency, performance festival, and projects presented in New York City and Miami, among other locations. Al-Shathir has used BOFFO’s program to bring a diverse range of artists to Fire Island who may not have otherwise felt welcome there.

Sydney Fishman is an independent curator, director, and producer born and based in New York. As BOFFO Programs Manager, Curator, Fishman oversees the curation and production of programming and organizes the BOFFO Performance Festival Fire Island. Fishman’s curatorial practice is dedicated to the close development of conceptual, performance, and physical work, with a particular emphasis on staging, public engagement, and archiving. Fishman is a founder and director of DUPLEX, a nomadic curatorial project formed in 2016, dedicated to supporting the work of emerging and genre-defying artists. For the past decade, she has worked with Marina Abramović in curatorial and archival roles to mount exhibitions and projects all over the world, including the upcoming ART VITAL: The 12 Years of Abramović and Ulay, at Cukrarna Gallery in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Lucas Ondak is a transsexual curator, writer, and researcher from Edmond, Oklahoma, the occupied land of the Comanche, Kickapoo, Kiowa, Osage, and Wichita people. Ondak serves as Residency Manager, Curator at BOFFO. They are committed to working with art and artists whose work centers on decolonization and queer liberation. They studied Art Practice at Stanford University and are a graduate of the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS), Bard College. In 2024, they served as Forge Project’s Land Use Researcher, assisting in the development of a comprehensive timeline of colonial land occupation and Indigenous survivance in the region.

Georgia Erger, Jeffrey Gibson, Jenelle Porter, Frye Art Museum