Ghetto Klown

John Leguizamo’s 40-year career in show business includes turns in iconic movies such as Carlito’s Way, Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge!, Chef, and Disney’s Encanto, as well as six award-winning one-man Broadway shows. As writer and performer, Leguizamo created the Off-Broadway sensation Mambo Mouth, (Obie, Outer Critics Circle, Vanguardia Awards), Spic-O-Rama (Dramatists’ Guild Hull-Warriner Award for Best American Play, Lucille Lortel Outstanding Achievement Award for Best Broadway Performance, Drama Desk Award for Best Solo Performance), and a third solo show, Freak, which completed a successful run on Broadway in 1998. A special presentation of Freak, directed by Spike Lee, aired on HBO, winning an Emmy Award for Outstanding Performance in a Variety or Music Program. In Fall 2001, Leguizamo returned to Broadway with Sexaholix . . . A Love Story (Outer Critics Circle Award nomination for Outstanding Solo Performance and Tony Award nomination for Best Special Theatrical Performance). Sexaholix also aired as an HBO Special in Spring 2002 and toured widely. In 2018, he received a special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement. He lives in New York City. Christa Cassano is a visual artist and storyteller. She was nominated for an Eisner Award for co-adapting Ghetto Klown into a graphic novel, contributed to the RESIST! newsletter distributed at the Women’s March on Washington 2017, and the comix anthologies A.P.B.—Artists against Police Brutality and Schmuck. She was artist in residence at Yaddo and the Atlantic Center for the Arts, a two-time Lloyd Sherwood Grant recipient, a winner of the EspoArte2000 Award for Excellence in Contemporary Art, among others, and is a former member of Hang Dai Studios in Brooklyn. She illustrated a visual life of Native American artist T.C. Cannon for the Museum of Modern Art in 2021, and appears in a Netflix documentary on the Fairbanks Four. Shamus Beyale grew up in the Navajo Nation in New Mexico, where he fell in love with reading, movies, video games, comic books, and drawing. After graduating from high school and receiving a Gates Millennium Scholarship, he attended the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan to study cartooning and graduated with a BFA. He has helped out on art direction for the DC Universe Online video game, published works from Zenescope Entertainment, and has storyboarded numerous TV commercials. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife. Drew Friedman is an award-winning cartoonist and illustrator whose work has appeared in publications such as RAW, Heavy Metal, National Lampoon, MAD, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and others. Since the beginning of his career in the 1980s, his work has both satirized and paid homage to celebrities and prominent pop-culture icons. As a portrait artist, Friedman prefers to draw subjects who interest him, from controversial political figures to famous Jewish comedians to legendary comic book creators. Friedman’s incredibly detailed, sometimes gruesome, always deliberate pen-and-ink style has been praised by the likes of Kurt Vonnegut and R. Crumb. In 2000, Friedman received awards from the National Cartoonist Society for Newspaper Illustration and Magazine Illustration, and in 2014 he received the Inkpot Award at San Diego Comic-Con. Lin-Manuel Miranda is an award-winning composer, lyricist, singer, actor, producer, and playwright. He is the creator and star of the Broadway musicals In the Heights, which won four Tony Awards, and Hamilton, which won the Pulitzer Prize and 11 Tony Awards, and Disney’s Encanto. Miranda’s accolades include three Grammy Awards, an Emmy Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Kennedy Center Honor. He lives in New York City.