II. PROJECTS

Selected Works

Bottoming for Jesus

Solo Performance • Touring 2024–2026

Bottoming for Jesus is a queer coming-of-faith solo performance by Michael R. Speciàle about longing for purpose, for transcendence, for an imagined future self. A work of sincerity, satire, and embodied spiritual inquiry, the piece invites audiences to explore their own relationship to faith in what the Willamette Weekly calls "an audacious but essential work of art."

Moving between memoir, theology, musical numbers, and sharp wit, the performance unveils itself as a ritual of undoing, reassembling, and making meaning on one's own terms as Speciàle guides the audience through an intimate exploration of holes and the lengths we go to fill them.

Developed with award-winning director Spenser Theberge and music director Jeremiah Ginn, the performance premiered at LINT in Los Angeles, CA and is now touring nationally, with a planned run at Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2026.

Explore Bottoming for Jesus Book for Presentation ->

Critique Cabaret

Performance Lecture + Pop Assemblage • Created + Performed by Mandy Harris Williams • 2025

Critique Cabaret is a performance-lecture and live inquiry by Mandy Harris Williams examining what it means to think, feel, and perform in a world where attention has become both currency and trap. Moving between critical theory, cabaret glamour, and digital intimacy, Williams stages a space where scholarship becomes spectacle and spectacle becomes survival.

The performance culminates with a final sequence that blurs the line between private confession and confrontation with her parasocial community, asking who is permitted to step back from the struggle for justice, who is expected to keep performing care, and what it costs to be perceived as politically coherent in public.

Critique Cabaret is creatively produced by Family Affairs Studio and commissioned by Performance Space New York.

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Research + Publications

Love Letters From AI

Zine + Lecture • Created by Michael R. Speciàle • 2024-2025

A publication and live lecture-performance (currently in development) exploring authorship, lineage, and equity in the age of machine learning. The zine combines manifesto, memoir, and visual essay.

Family AffairsStudio

Family Affairs
Studio