A segment from the Live Film collaboration Teddy´s Bestiary between young German feminist filmmaker Evelyn Russeler and Vaginal Davis, the outsider art & music icon.

La Davis portrays Theodore Adorno´s mother through a series of letters where they share their love for the Hippos at the Berlin Zoo. In the fantasia universe of Vaginal Davis -- Adorno´s writings become a launching pad for a whimsically poetic music cantata, spirited along via Eric Satie as channeled through high note Suzi, Grace Moore, the film opera diva of the early 1930s.

"The oeuvre of Vaginal Davis represents a one-person pageant of perpetually shifting plural personae. She holds the titles of Ph.D., impresario, queercore crooner, Ethyl Eichelberger award winning performance artist, and as Jennie Klein remarks, "ultimate postmodern persona: a trickster whose shape shifting resists easy identification with any single minority group."

Her extensive repertoire of assumed roles and musical ensembles includes ¡Cholita!, Madame Bricktop, Rev’rend Saint Salicia Tate, and Buster Butone. Each of these is accompanied by its own highly particularized patois, be it that of anachronistic Jazz Age jargon or evangelical Christian sermonizing. As José Muñoz observes, Davis disidentifies with the verbal and visual signifying systems that surround these figures, never attempting to execute them with accuracy or realism in mind, exposing them as exaggeratively stylized fictions. In doing so, she offers a contemporary, text-based reinterpretation of what Daphne Brooks refers to as the 19th-century strategy of a "spectacular opacity" that "confound[s] and disrupt[s] conventional constructions of the racialized and gendered body". The spectacular opacity of Vaginal Davis’s verbal constructions impersonates that of a vaudeville theater marquee. Employing amplified wattage, Davis wields words as though they were neon bulbs, ever in the act of announcing that she is Appearing Live Onstage."
- Mashinka Firunts

"A figure whose career has spanned the worlds of punk rock, indie film, performance art and radical zines, whose oeuvre is studied in academia...a performance artist of underground legend."
- Guy Trebay, New York Times

"[She] is the key proponent of the disruptive performance aesthetic known as terrorist drag...Her body a car-crash of excessive significations, Vaginal Davis stages a clash of identifications within and against both heterosexual and queer cultures, and Black and Hispanic identities...By renewing uncertainties within alternative cultures and identities, Vaginal Davis opens up spaces for their continual struggle towards renewed and greater challenges"
- Dominic Johnson, Frieze Magazine

CV