Author Talk & Reading: Jibz Cameron and Svetlana Kitto

Jibz Cameron — the iconoclast performance artist behind Dynasty Handbag — reads from her debut memoir Hell in a Handbag, a wild, unflinching journey from Northern California commune kid to East Bay punk zine maker to New York avant-garde provocateur. Candid and darkly funny, the book is a reckoning with queerness, misogyny, capitalism, and the absurd tragedy of contemporary life. Cameron joins writer, editor, and oral historian Svetlana Kitto for what promises to be a dynamic and unpredictable conversation.

Jibz Cameron is a writer, performer, visual artist, and actor best known for her multimedia performance work as alter ego Dynasty Handbag, spanning over 20 years. She is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2021 United States Artists Award recipient, and a 2020 Creative Capital Grant awardee. Her film Weirdo Night, directed by Mariah Garnett, was an official 2021 Sundance Film Festival selection.

Svetlana Kitto is a writer, editor, and oral historian whose work has appeared in New York, Frieze, Vanity Fair, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She is the Editor at Dia Art Foundation and co-curator of And I Saw New Heavens and a New Earth: The Partnership, Art, and Activism of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, currently on view at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis through August 2026.