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Producer · Actor

1987-06-25 · Berkeley, California, U.S. · Other

9 series in the catalog

Alexander "Sasha" Hedges Steinberg (born June 25, 1987), known professionally as Sasha Velour, is an American drag queen, artist, actress, author, and stage and television producer, based in Brooklyn, New York. Steinberg is known for winning the ninth season of RuPaul's Drag Race, her drag revue NightGowns, and her one-queen theatrical work, Smoke & Mirrors.

Early life and education

Born in Berkeley, California, Steinberg was raised in New Haven, Connecticut, until the age of nine when her family moved to Urbana, Illinois. Steinberg is the only child of Mark Steinberg, a scholar of Russian history and professor in the Department of History at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Jane Hedges, who served as editor at Yale University Press and managing editor of the Slavic Review. Steinberg is of Russian Jewish descent on her father's side, and identifies with her father's faith. Her grandmother emigrated from the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic via Manchuria.

Steinberg graduated from University Laboratory High School in Champaign-Urbana in 2004. After high school, she spent a year abroad with family and worked as a part-time security guard at the Russian State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, and interned at the Staatsoper (State Opera) in Berlin, Germany.

Steinberg obtained an A.B. from the Independent Program (with a focus on Modern Literatures) from Vassar College in 2009. In 2010, she was a Fulbright Scholar in Moscow and completed a project that aimed to understand the role of different art forms in contemporary Russian society. She received an M.F.A. in cartooning in 2013 from the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont. Prior to pursuing drag as a full-time career, Steinberg worked as a freelance graphic designer and illustrator, an English language tutor, and as head of production for the children's book publisher, Toon Books.

Illustration and graphic design

Steinberg moved to New York with her partner John Jacob Lee (known professionally as Johnny Velour) in 2013. She created comics and zines that she self-published and sold at conventions. Steinberg's work was also published in The Nib, InkBRICK, Comics Workbook Magazine, QU33R, Cicada Magazine and others, under the names Sasha Velour and Sasha Steinberg. Steinberg also created a comic entitled Stonewall, which attempted to tell the story of the Stonewall riots using real and fictional characters. The work was called "a smart, beautiful and artful take on a significant and difficult historical event" by Highlow Comics. Steinberg's visual art has been the subject of two solo gallery shows. A show entitled “What's Your Drag” was on display at Be Gallery NYC in spring 2014 (in connection with BeFluent, the English school where she taught), and another solo show entitled "Nightrooms", was held at the Black Box Gallery (located in Bizarre Bushwick) in Brooklyn in March 2016. Steinberg's cut paper work was part of the group show "Coney Island Babies, Visual Artists from the Brooklyn Drag Scene" at the Bureau of General Services Queer Division that opened in Manhattan in November 2012. In March 2017, Steinberg designed a long sleeve T-shirt for "Contemporary Drag", a limited-edition fashion line for the New Art Dealers Alliance's (NADA) in collaboration with Print All Over Me and she performed at the NADA show that month.

Steinberg featured as the cover artist for the June 12, 2023 issue of The New Yorker.

Early drag

Steinberg started performing in drag while studying at The Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont. She also met her partner John Jacob Lee (known as Johnny Velour) in Vermont when he was acting in a production of Annie. In the spring of 2013, Steinberg and her partner staged Whatever She Wants, A Drag Musicale at the Main Street Museum featuring local residents. She called producing the show a "milestone" of her drag career and moved to Brooklyn later that year.

Steinberg began performing in New York City in early 2014. She founded Velour, The Drag Magazine (originally named Vym), a magazine about drag, alongside partner Johnny in the summer of 2014. The magazine included interviews as well as varied art forms such as photography, poetry, and illustration that address the power, beauty, and purpose of drag. Three issues were published over two years and the magazine was compiled into a 300-page hardcover book in 2018.

Steinberg began producing a monthly drag show, NightGowns, in August 2015, at Bizarre Bushwick. The show has been regularly hosted at Bizarre Bushwick and National Sawdust, both in Brooklyn New York. The shows have been celebrated as "beautiful and funny and politically charged" by The New York Times. It was later adapted into a TV series for Quibi.

RuPaul's Drag Race

Steinberg auditioned for RuPaul's Drag Race's eighth season but was not selected to participate. In 2017, she competed in and ultimately won the ninth season of the show. Steinberg's lip sync to Whitney Houston's "So Emotional" in the season finale was named “performance of the year” by The A.V. Club and was also named one of "TV's Best Musical Moments" by Entertainment Weekly. The lip-sync was later referenced on Saturday Night Live, during Kate McKinnon's impression of Elizabeth Warren.

During the airing of the show, Steinberg starred in the music video for the non-record single "C.L.A.T." alongside fellow New York City drag artists Peppermint, Aja and Alexis Michelle, all of whom also appeared on the ninth season of Drag Race.

Post-Drag Race success

Steinberg founded The House of Velour in 2017, a production company that she uses to produce stage, film work and merchandise. KC Ifeyani at Fast Company said the company was "disrupting the business of drag". Steinberg expanded her drag showcase NightGowns, moving it from Bizarre Bushwick to National Sawdust in April 2017. The show also toured to Los Angeles, London, and played at Terminal 5 in New York City, with Janet Jackson in attendance.

In 2018, Steinberg partnered with Opening Ceremony to host and direct their New York Fashion Week show. Steinberg selected 40 LGBTQ+ models to walk, creating the first all queer show in New York Fashion Week history. The show featured other notable drag performers (Lypsinka, Shea Couleé, Jiggly Caliente, Miss Fame, Farrah Moan, Hungry, and more) as well as a surprise performance from Christina Aguilera.

In 2017, Google commissioned Steinberg to create a Google Doodle of German singer-actress Marlene Dietrich which appeared on Google's homepage on December 27, 2017, the 116th anniversary of Dietrich's birth. Steinberg impersonated Dietrich in the Snatch Game challenge on season 9 of RuPaul's Drag Race. For the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising in 2019, Steinberg published a detailed history comic about the events of that night titled Three Dollar Riot. She had first begun working on the comic years before for her thesis project at the Center for Cartoon Studies; a previous version of the comic was published in 2012 under the name Stonewall.

Variety featured Steinberg in the "Power of New York List 2019", and she appeared in Out's annual OUT100 list twice (2017 and 2019). In June 2019, a panel of judges from New York magazine placed Steinberg 12th on their list of "the most powerful drag queens in America", a ranking of 100 former Drag Race contestants.

During a period of isolation brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic in the summer of 2021, Steinberg produced a series of papier-mâché masks called "Faces of Drag", which honors ten pioneers in "the world history of drag". Those highlighted by the series include Izumo no Okuni, Rebecca and Her Daughters, William Dorsey Swann, Mei Lanfang, Barbette, Josephine Baker, Coccinelle, José Sarria, and Divine.

Steinberg has spoken at the Teen Vogue Summit (June 2018), The Long Conversation at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. (Dec. 2018) and for colleges including Purdue, The University of Illinois at Urbana…