“Just Another Shadie Bitch”

“Just Another Shadie Bitch” is a multimedia opera in six parts that examines representations of femme individuals across media, framed around the primadonna Carmen from Georges Bizet’s 1875 French opera. The project investigates how racialization and gender marking operate within narrative structures, shaping both character and the public’s relation to them, while attending to processes through which subjectivity unfolds.

Each act pairs Carmen’s story with another character, person, or field of knowledge, producing assemblages that probe the conditions under which meaning is constructed. The project began through research at the CORE Program at the MFAH and Akademie Schloss Solitude and received support from the Houston Arts Alliance. It unfolds across multisensory installations, film, prints, and objects.