Biography
Dr. Sadie Hochman-Ruiz is a transwoman and uses she/her pronouns. She works as an artist, researcher, educator and activist.
Her research and teaching interests build on her career as the drag queen Sadie Pins, the friendships she’s made and why they matter. Drag allowed her to step out of a university-based arts scene and become better acquainted with San Diego’s border communities. Her social circle and collaborators crossed race and class lines in ways unavailable within the experimental art world, and the feedback she received on her performance style and its unique brand of gender and sexual deviance prompted critical questions about what it means to make a queer project and how that connects to local justice initiatives.
Alongside the growth of her drag career, she reconnected with music-making. Her early research centered the electric guitar to explore the queer potential of technology. She plays guitar and electronics in the band masc4masc with her best friend Hillary Jean Young. Check out their debut record “Not Another Queer Movie” on your music streaming service.
She is currently developing her research interests into a book about the transition from live voice to lip-syncing in the 1960s. While addressing shifts in performance practice and technology, the book explores a queer community increasingly divided by race, gender identity, class, and age.
Currently, she resides in Chicago and teaches at Harper College. She continues her activism through participation in the Second City Sisters, a novice house of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, as Sister Malört Tisha.