Why support Nuit Rose?
Because queer art needs space, structure, and resources to thrive. Because artists deserve fees. Because public culture doesn’t happen by magic. Because community-funded work makes room for risk, experiment, joy, and visibility.
You can find our support page via the link in our bio or directly here:
https://www.throbbingrose.ca/support

Nuit Rose is powered by the queer community!
Volunteers help us create welcoming, inclusive, and vibrant spaces across the festival.
If you’re interested in arts, events, or community building, this is a great way to get involved.
Join us for Nuit Rose: Rewilding.
Apply via link in our bio or sign up here:
https://www.throbbingrose.ca/volunteer

Any support helps.
If you believe queer artists deserve to be paid for their labour and not asked to donate it, supporting the Throbbing Rose Collective is a direct way to make that belief practical.
Every contribution helps us fund artists, cover production costs, and continue building space for queer art in this city.

Have a few hours to spare? That’s enough.
We’re looking for volunteers for a range of roles across Nuit Rose: Rewilding, from welcoming audiences to supporting venues and installations.
Flexible shifts. Friendly team. Meaningful experience.

Sponsor a room. Shape the festival.
Nuit Rose 2026 includes exhibitions and programming across multiple venues. Sponsoring a room helps cover programming costs for a specific space and supports the artists and audiences who gather there.
It’s a direct way to help make the festival possible.

Volunteer with Nuit Rose and work alongside artists, curators, and performers.
From installations to performances, you’ll get a close-up view of how the festival comes together.
If you’re curious, collaborative, and want to help create something special, we’d love to hear from you.

Sponsor an artist for Nuit Rose 2026.
One direct way to support the festival is to help fund an artist’s participation. Your contribution helps bring new queer work into the world and makes sure artists are supported for their time, labour, and imagination.
To find out which artists are available to support, get in touch.

Nuit Rose: REWILDING (2026) is just around the corner.
Join us in Toronto’s Church–Wellesley Village June 18–21 for an unforgettable celebration of queer art and performance.

Throwback to Nuit Rose 2016, when Duo Trapeze (Britt and Tanya) dazzled audiences at The 519 with their performance Angles and Curves. Supported by A Girl In The Sky Productions, the piece explored the shifting dynamics of sexual desire and the beauty of bisexuality and pansexuality through breathtaking aerial movement.

Relive the moment:
https://youtu.be/tVn5NRZAoqQ?si=tjdJQ9XB7bpPkuCP

Stay tuned for updates as we reveal what’s coming for Nuit Rose 2026.

Nuit Rose 2017: What Lies Between Venus and Mars brought together a vibrant constellation of queer art and performance across Toronto.

Highlights included the indie band Long Branch, whose genre-blending sound moves between city and country influences; the LOVED Collective exhibition, presenting intimate portraits while unpacking the power of queer social formations; and Laura Petelko’s collaborative documentary following musician T. Thomason’s journey through gender transformation.

The festival also featured a joint exhibition by Maddie Alexander & Morgan Sears-Williams exploring femme identity; Shawn Postoff’s Praise the Gods mosaic series inspired by Emperor Hadrian and Antinous; and Rob Croxford’s playful paintings using wordplay to reflect on gay identity and labels.

Performances included Charlena Russell’s multi-instrumental, sound-activated light suit with loop pedal and video projection, while projects by Irem Harnak (Made This Way) and Mark Sepic (The Junkestra) explored self-discovery, transformation, and the creative possibilities of sound, material, and myth.

Two exhibitions unfolded at Artscape (now ArtHubs) Youngplace and the Critical Distance Centre for Curators during Nuit Rose 2019, bringing together work by nine remarkable artists: Alejandro Rizzo Nervo, Alexi Pedneault, Humboldt Magnussen, Joey Suriano, Michael Stecky, Kyle Yip, Texas & Glory, Ebrin Bagheri, and Eric Chengyang.
Curated by John Rubino and Emily Peltier, these exhibitions expanded the festival’s presence across the city, creating space for contemporary queer practice in dialogue with community and place.

In past years, Nuit Rose has invited the community to gather and illuminate creativity through lantern-making workshops. Artists and participants of all backgrounds came together to craft glowing forms that lit up our shared journey, celebrating self-expression, connection, and collective joy.
These workshops flowed into luminous Light Parades across the Village, including Joey Bruni’s Cocoon Project, presented during the opening weekend of WorldPride 2014, where light became both spectacle and statement.
Want to be part of this year’s festival? Stay tuned for upcoming posts and join us for Nuit Rose: Rewilding, June 18–21, 2026.

On June 13, 2019, Nuit Rose transformed the former Slack’s nightclub at the heart of Toronto’s Church–Wellesley Village for the ARCADE Launch Party. The space pulsed with performance, art, and celebration, honouring the queer artists, performers, and contributors who shaped that year’s festival.

The night set the tone for the annual Art Crawl and Light Parade on June 15, with a special DJ set by Tam Ika carrying the energy forward.

Nuit Rose returns June 18–21, 2026, rewilding the Church–Wellesley Village with art, performance, light, and sound.

Collective member Sarah Hunter is beginning a new body of work rooted in memory, myth, and transformation.
Started in the fall of 2025, this emerging series draws on Sarah’s time spent in India at age 17, when she completed Grade 12 at Woodstock School in the Himalayas. Working with coloured inks on paper, she looks to Indian art traditions and Mughal miniature paintings of Krishna, alongside Hindu myths and creation stories, as sources of visual and conceptual inspiration.
The work explores magical, mystical, and hybrid figures, part human, part animal, echoing Sarah’s long-standing fascination with fairy tales, mythologies, and the spaces where identities blur. Through these images, she reflects on how those early experiences in India informed her as a young artist, while also considering queer resonances within myth, hybridity, and non-binary forms of being.
This series marks the beginning of a longer exploration Sarah plans to develop over the coming years.

“Wild Waysides: Queer Ecology and the New Natural” is a multidisciplinary exhibition exploring how queer thinking reshapes our understanding of nature and belonging.

Originally curated by Pearl Van Geest and James Fowler, the project has toured across Canada, presenting works that challenge conventional ideas of landscape, identity, and the natural world.

For its next presentation — curated by Kristy Boyce — Wild Waysides comes to the RIT City Art Space, where selections from the original exhibition will be shown alongside new contributions from artists in the LGBTQIA+ community.

Featuring: Francisco Alvarez, Schem Rogerson Bader, Emily Baker, Hartley Bauer, Dillon Bryant, Louis Chavez, Kit Foster, James Fowler, Audrey Fuller, Massimo Greco & Silas Sims, Dante Hansen, Charlie Hunter & Mike Wyeld, Sarah Hunter, Katthew Kennaz, Lou Losier, Jack Manning, Jonathan Mills, Remington Potter, David Rose, John Anthony Rubino, Evie Johnny Ruddy, Walter Segers, Cai Sepulis, Christian Bernard Singer, Josh Thorson, Pearl Van Geest, Caroline Williams, Jason Wu, Keely Wu, Jackie Zysk & Lydia Sharp.

Nuit Rose 2016 unfolded as NIGHT SHIFT, a city-wide surge of vibrant performances, visual art, music, and collective courage. The night pulsed with energy, love, and a spirit of resistance, as artists and audiences moved through Toronto after dark, transforming public space into sites of connection and expression.
From the breathtaking aerial work of Duo Trapeze’s Angles and Curves, to quiet moments like Slow Dance and Cast Me at The 519, NIGHT SHIFT held space for spectacle and tenderness alike. Across galleries and pop-up venues, artists explored intimacy, nightlife, memory, and movement, including works shown at AKASHA Art Projects and Artscape Youngplace.

Nuit Rose returned in 2019 with ARCADE, filling Toronto with vibrant energy, colour, and queer creativity. Across the Village and beyond, the night unfolded through art-crafting at The 519, lanterns glowing for the Light Parade, performances at The Garage, and exhibitions at Artscape Youngplace where nine artists explored queer contemporary practice.

Be part of this next chapter. Submit your proposal for Nuit Rose: Rewilding (2026) by January 15, 2026. Visit https://www.throbbingrose.ca/projects/nuitrose2026 or check the link in bio.

From taking over Church Street to the sounds of the Counterpoint Community Orchestra, ARCADE transformed the city into a playground of performance, light, and collective joy an unforgettable night of art, excitement, and community in motion.

Nuit Rose - Drag in a Bag returned in February 2018 with Family Jewels, a fundraiser celebrating queer excess, performance, and playful subversion. Family Jewels turned drag into a joyous act of inheritance, chosen family, and collective glamour.
Be part of this next chapter. Submit your proposal for Nuit Rose: Rewilding (2026) by January 15, 2026. Visit https://www.throbbingrose.ca/projects/nuitrose2026 or check the link in bio.
Rooted in humour, risk, and community support, Drag in a Bag has long been a space where amateur drag meets unapologetic spectacle. Family Jewels carried that spirit forward, proving once again that joy, camp, and generosity sit at the heart of Nuit Rose.
Photos by Marycarla Quintazzi and Adam Zivo

Nuit Rose 2017: What Lies Between Venus and Mars? Nuit Rose returned in 2017 with a festival that stretched across four Toronto neighbourhoods, filling each space with queer imagination, performance, and art. The theme asked a simple but expansive question: What Lies Between Venus and Mars? The answer unfolded through exhibitions, street activations, the Light Parade, parties, and works by dozens of artists exploring myth, identity, desire, and the cosmos.
Be part of this next chapter. Submit your proposal for Nuit Rose: Rewilding (2026) by January 15, 2026. Visit https://www.throbbingrose.ca/projects/nuitrose2026 or check the link in bio.

Between Protest and Parade: Love and Resistance - For Nuit Rose 2017 (Nuit Rose: Unbound), artist Pearl Van Geest explored the intertwined energies of love and resistance. Drawing from historic photographs of Toronto’s first Pride parade and the 1980 bathhouse raid protests, Between Protest and Parade transformed archival imagery into tactile carvings, prints, and banners, acts of art-making that bridge memory and movement.
Be part of this ongoing story. Submit your proposal for Nuit Rose: Rewilding (2026) by January 15, 2026. Visit https://www.throbbingrose.ca/projects/nuitrose2026 or check the link in bio.
In Between Protest and Parade: Love and Resistance, visitors to The 519 were invited to create their own prints from the sculpted reliefs, a shared act of creation that echoed the collective energy at the heart of Pride’s beginnings. The piece reminds us that joy and defiance are not opposites but intertwined forces, beating in rhythm together.

Sarah Hunter: Embracing Identity Through Art - For artist and collective member Sarah Hunter, Nuit Rose has been a space of discovery, expression, and connection. Their first participation in WorldPride 2014 introduced them to a vibrant community of queer artists, including a photographer from Jamaica who helped organize the country’s first Pride Parade, an encounter that left a lasting impression.

Be part of this legacy. Submit your proposal for Nuit Rose: Rewilding (2026) by January 15, 2026. Visit https://www.throbbingrose.ca/projects/nuitrose2026 or check the link in bio.

By Nuit Rose 2017, Sarah presented works exploring their genderqueer identity for the first time, marking a powerful step in their personal and creative journey. “Having the opportunity to show these works helped me embrace my identity more fully.” Sarah Hunter

Sarah’s contributions across 2014, 2016, 2017, and 2018 reflect the spirit of Nuit Rose, a celebration of queer transformation and creative courage.