lEcHELL Rush
Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, LeChell Rush is a Black queer multidisciplinary artist who creates socially engaged works exploring the complexities and taboos of intersectionality through the lens of queerness, femininity, and mothering in Black womanhood. Her mediums include poetry, photography, film, and collage.
As a poet, LeChell is a 4x Womxn of the World Poetry Slam Finalist, Stonewall International Poetry Slam Finalist, Right 2 Write Poetry Slam Champion, Southern Fried Poetry Champion, and Watering Hole Fellow. She is the author of two full-length poetry collections, “Cause Therapy Ain’t For Black Folks from Qwest Press and the self-published collection Jaywalking. Additionally, she has penned the chapbook “Flat Feet, Diabetes, and A Pretty Smile.” LeChell has been published in Defunkt Magazine and graced stages throughout the nation. Her performances can be found on Write About Now, Charm City Slam, and Button Poetry.
As a visual artist, LeChell's choice of blended, mixed, and multimedia art forms is an homage to her identity and the community in which she serves; Black womanhood and queerness are a creation of culture rooted in doing what you can with what you have, where you are, reshaping something extraordinary out of the mundane. LeChell explains her work as both witness and archive, an attempt to weave found objects into the documentation of black femme vernacular.
LeChell honors Carrie Mae Weems, Gordon Parks, Zora Neale Hurston, and black women from the hood as influences for her work.
