BARBARA M. BICKART is an interdisciplinary artist whose work is based in video and performance. She is currently working on I Look Up to the Sky Now, a collaborative community documentary project with LBGTQ youth as an artist in residence with the Youth Enrichment Services program of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center, NYC. This project has received funding from the New York State Council on the Arts, Electronic Media and Film program; ASTRAEA, the National Lesbian Action Foundation; the Open Meadows Foundation; and the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation's Artist and Communities program.

Bickart was the recipient of a 2001 New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship and her attendance at the 47th and 48th International Flaherty Seminar was supported by fellowships from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.

Bickart was a public high school teacher, and the Assistant Director of the NYC Board of Education's Bronx Literacy Center for four years, prior to beginning her work with young queer people in 1989 when she established the Youth Enrichment Services (YES) program of the Lesbian & Gay Community Services Center, NY. She served as the Director of the award-winning YES program from 1991-1995. From 1995 through September of 2000, she served as the Special Projects Coordinator and as artist-in-residence to the YES program.

Her recent community-based artwork includes:

• Turned Up Volume, is an on-going video performance residency project at DiverseWorks in Houston that Bickart directs with youth from HATCH (Houston Area Teen Coalition on Homosexuality). Each year some of the young queer people she mentors in New York City, participate in the project as collaborators.
  
  
• KEEPING THE FAITH - the prison project, an on-going project created and facilitated by the Pat Graney Company, under the artistic direction of choreographer, Pat Graney, that works with incarcerated women. Bickart is the video artist on a multi-disciplinary team of artists.
  
  
• School's OUT and TAG - We're it!!!, video and performance projects with queer young people were developed under the artistic direction of Bickart from 1996 - 2000 as an artist in residence in the Public Imaginations program of Dance Theater Workshop, NYC. (From 1992-1996, School's OUT was developed under the direction of Mary Ellen Strom and the facilitation of Bickart). In 1999-2000, Bickart was awarded an Artist as Catalyst grant from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation for this project. She has worked extensively with young queer people in video and performance since 1989 and performances have taken place at Dance Theater Workshop, NYC; DiverseWorks, Houston, TX; the Miami Light Project, Miami, FL; La Mama e.t.c., NYC; It's Queer Up North Festival, Manchester, England; The Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, MA among other locations.

Other recent projects and residencies include:

• Gender Variance Perception: Yours, Mine, Ours a short documentary video, showcased at The New Festival, NYC
• GIRLS &... a video performance installation project directed by Mary Ellen Strom; assistant directed by Bickart in Atlanta, GA which culminated in events at The Contemporary Center (Atlanta) and The High Museum of Atlanta. Girls &... received support from the Rockefeller Foundation's Multi-Arts Project Grant and Creative Capital.
• The Jersey City Alliance Oral History Project, NJ
• Jersey City Museum Public Arts Project, NJ
• The AIDS Center of Queens County Queer Youth Public Art Project, NYC