“One of the world’s
finest drag entertainers.”
Sasha Velour is a gender-fluid drag queen known for her stage spectacles, fierce activism, and boundary-breaking scholarship. Sasha is the founder and director of the acclaimed NYC drag revue NightGowns. Her first one-queen show, Smoke & Mirrors, toured to 90 theaters around the world from 2019-2022, including the Folies Bergère and the London Palladium. She recently released a best-selling book, The Big Reveal: An Illustrated Manifesto of Drag, which outlines the untold history of drag alongside her own life’s adventures (Harper, 2023). Velour’s stage show of the same name toured the US, Canada, the UK and the EU and has sites set on Latin America, Australia, and Asia.
In 2017, Sasha won the 9th season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, and the long-running competition won its first Emmy! In 2020, she executive produced and starred in a short adaptation of NightGowns directed by Sophie Muller and co-produced by The Documentary Group, which received the 2021 RealScreen Award. In 2023, Sasha joined the cast of HBO’s Emmy and Peabody Award-winning We’re Here, which was nominated for two Critics Choice Real TV Awards (Best Ensemble Cast, Best Structured Unscripted Series). In August 2024, she debuted Velour: A Drag Spectacular, her newest theater piece co-created with Tectonic Theater Project and director Moisés Kaufman at the lauded La Jolla Playhouse.
As an illustrator and designer, Sasha has produced several comic books, including a series about the Stonewall uprising (2012-2019) and an anthology about drag called Velour (2013-2018). She drew the Google Doodle for Marlene Dietrich in 2018, and created an award-winning self-portrait for the cover of The New Yorker in 2023.
Sasha lives in Brooklyn with her partner Johnny Velour and their dog, Vanya.
