Moulin Noir Arts Collective
ART. CARE. CULTURE. COMMUNITY.
Moulin Noir Arts Collective is the nonprofit programmatic arm of Haus of Moulin Noir.
We exist to preserve culture, invest in artists, provide material community care, and create spaces where Black, queer, trans, Sapphic, Ballroom, and other historically excluded communities can create, gather, learn, and thrive.
Haus of Moulin Noir builds the culture.
Moulin Noir Arts Collective builds the infrastructure that helps sustain the people creating it.
Through the Collective, we seek philanthropic, public, and community investment to provide free and accessible programming, compensate artists for their labor, preserve cultural knowledge, provide direct community support, and build programs housed within the Haus of Moulin Noir.
We believe artists should be paid. We believe community care should be material. We believe cultural preservation requires resources. And we believe the people who create culture deserve institutions designed to invest back into them.
our programs
The Haus Takes Care
Our Mutual Aid Program and Community Care Program provides direct support to community members experiencing financial hardship, emergencies, safety concerns, and other immediate needs.
Support may include food, transportation, emergency lodging, housing stabilization, utilities, clothing, personal-care needs, safety response, artist assistance, and other urgent needs.
This work began informally, with Haus founder Moon Brown using her own personal funds to meet community needs when traditional systems were too slow, inaccessible, or absent.
The Arts Collective is building the infrastructure to transform those individual acts of care into a sustainable community resource.
We don't just build community. We resource it.
The Ballroom Bodega
Our community food pantry provides accessible food and essential items to members of our community experiencing food insecurity.
The pantry is designed around dignity rather than surveillance.
Whenever possible, community members can choose the food and supplies that work for their household rather than receiving a predetermined box.
Through donations, partnerships, food drives, and grant support, we work to maintain groceries, shelf-stable foods, hygiene products, household essentials, and culturally relevant foods.
Food is not a reward.
Food is a basic condition for people to live, create, and participate fully in community.
Moulin Noir armoire
Moulin Noir Armoire is our community clothing, fashion, and personal-expression resource.
Community members can donate new and gently used clothing, shoes, accessories, professional attire, performance pieces, gender-affirming clothing, wigs, makeup, and other wearable items.
Those resources are then made available to community members who need them.
The Armoire recognizes something traditional clothing closets often overlook:
Clothing isn't only about covering the body. It can be safety, employment, gender affirmation, artistic expression, confidence, performance, and belonging.
Whether someone needs an outfit for an interview, everyday clothing, a gender-affirming wardrobe, something to walk a Ballroom category, or simply something that makes them feel like themselves, the Armoire exists to make access easier.
our programs
Artist Investment
Artists are constantly asked to donate their labor to community. We are building a different model.
Moulin Noir Arts Collective seeks funding specifically to pay artists, culture bearers, educators, filmmakers, dancers, designers, musicians, photographers, performers, writers, and other creatives to create programming within Haus of Moulin Noir.
Funding allows us to provide artist stipends, commissions, residencies, teaching opportunities, workshops, exhibitions, performances, cultural documentation, and collaborative community projects.
Instead of asking artists to create programming for free, we seek institutional resources and move those resources directly to artists.
Culture is labor. Cultural workers deserve compensation.
BALLROOM PRESERVATION & EDUCATION
Ballroom is a living Black and Brown queer and trans cultural tradition.
Through workshops, practices, conversations, oral histories, exhibitions, mentorship, archival projects, and intergenerational learning, Moulin Noir Arts Collective supports the preservation and transmission of Ballroom knowledge.
Programming centers the people who carry the culture and creates paid opportunities for Ballroom leaders, educators, historians, commentators, performers, designers, DJs, photographers, and other cultural workers.
We don't preserve Ballroom by freezing it in history.
We preserve it by investing in the people keeping it alive.
CREATIVE LIBERATION:ART AS COLLECTIVE CARE.
Our arts programming uses creativity as a tool for imagination, healing, cultural memory, resistance, connection, and community building.
Programming includes our visual art, film, photography, dance, movement, poetry, spoken word, fashion, music, performance, storytelling, exhibitions, public art, workshops, and interdisciplinary projects.
We create opportunities for artists to experiment while inviting community members to see themselves as creators—not simply audiences.
Because art does more than document the world we live in.
Art helps us imagine the world we haven't built yet.
OUR PROGRAMS
Look at that horse
Look at That Horse is a Healing Ballroom program founded by Overall Father Mel that brings Ballroom youth and community members out of the city and into nature for intentional time with horses.
Through guided experiences such as meeting, grooming, feeding, walking, and riding horses, participants are invited to slow down, be present, build confidence, and experience connection outside of the pressures of everyday life.
The program uses horses and the natural environment as tools for wellness, emotional awareness, relationship-building, leadership, and collective care. Participants learn about boundaries, trust, communication, patience, responsibility, and how our energy can affect the people—and animals—around us.
For Ballroom youth especially, Look at That Horse creates another kind of floor: one where there is nothing to prove, no category to win, and no performance required.
Just community. Nature. Horses. And room to be.
Look at That Horse is part of our larger Healing Ballroom work—creating spaces where Ballroom can gather not only to compete, but to rest, learn, connect, and care for one another.
Community safety, built around the people we trust.
PULL UP is a community-powered safety platform rooted in Ballroom and built to help our people stay connected wherever we go. Houses can organize members and travel groups, while participants can use check-ins, temporary location sharing, and “I NEED MY HAUS” to quickly reach trusted support when they feel unsafe. Born from Ballroom’s tradition of chosen family and collective care, PULL UP is built on one principle: We Keep Us Safe.
Pull Up
HEALING BALLROOM
We can love Ballroom and still build something healthier.
Healing Ballroom is a community care, leadership, and cultural sustainability initiative designed to strengthen the relationships and infrastructure that hold Ballroom together.
Ballroom has always created family, refuge, art, identity, and possibility. Healing Ballroom asks us to bring that same imagination to how we navigate conflict, harm, accountability, leadership, communication, boundaries, and repairwithin our community.
Through workshops, facilitated conversations, leadership development, House scenarios, collective agreements, and practical tools, participants build skills for addressing conflict without immediately moving toward punishment, isolation, or disposability.
The work is rooted in transformative justice, trauma-informed practice, self-awareness, harm repair, and community accountability—while honoring Ballroom’s history, language, traditions, and chosen-family structures.
Healing Ballroom is about building a Ballroom with the tools to move through conflict without destroying each other.
Because preserving Ballroom means more than preserving what happens on the floor. We have to care for the people who keep the floor alive.
FUND THE ART. FEED THE PEOPLE. PRESERVE THE CULTURE. RESOURCE THE COMMUNITY.
The model is simple:
WE SEEK RESOURCES. WE PAY ARTISTS. ARTISTS CREATE. COMMUNITY PARTICIPATES. CULTURE IS PRESERVED. PEOPLE RECEIVE MATERIAL SUPPORT.
RESOURCES CIRCULATE BACK INTO COMMUNITY.
Grant funding and donations don't simply fund events. They create an ecosystem. An artist gets paid to teach. A young person gets access to that workshop. A Ballroom elder is compensated for sharing cultural knowledge. A filmmaker documents that knowledge.
The archive preserves it. A community member receives groceries from the pantry. Someone finds interview clothes in the Armoire. Someone facing an emergency receives mutual aid. And the Haus becomes more than a place people visit.
It becomes infrastructure for community.
THE RELATIONSHIP
HAUS OF MOULIN NOIR
Culture • Ballroom • Family • Creative Community
The Haus is our cultural home and the larger ecosystem where community, Ballroom, art, gathering, and creative practice live.
MOULIN NOIR ARTS COLLECTIVE
Nonprofit Programming • Artist Investment • Community Care • Cultural Preservation
The Arts Collective holds our nonprofit and community-benefit programming, develops funded initiatives, seeks grants and philanthropic support, compensates artists and educators, operates community-care programs, and creates accessible public programming within the Haus.
Together, they create something larger:
A Haus that creates culture.
A Collective that resources it.
A community that owns what we build together.