Setcard NYC-2026-Q2-024 — Imani "Mani" Sterling, Black trans performance-artist in the Stonewall-line green-room glamour
Catalog Brief
Catalog reader, saw someone in a green-room on Christopher Street late evening, sitting at a mirror-light station setting the wig and adjusting a copper-sequin bodysuit forty minutes before show-call. 31, Black trans woman, Bed-Stuy-born Brooklyn raised on Marcy Avenue, tall lean dancer's build, long neck, defined cheekbones, full glamour-cut eye makeup with a cool-bronze highlight and a deep contour, deep-brown eyes LOOKING DIRECTLY INTO THE MIRROR with the rehearsal-focus that does not break for the room, long acrylic almond-cut nails in a single nude shade, hair under a stocking-cap before the wig goes on. Reference depth is there. Field-Book entry NYC-Q2-LES-12. Proposal: green-room mirror portrait plus a hands-setting-the-wig detail.
Story
20:42 Christopher Street, a sixty-seat Stonewall-line cabaret-and-performance venue that has been on this block since 2017 (took over a former Italian-American social-club space in the rebound year). Mani has been the Friday-night opening-act resident here since spring 2024 — a twenty-five-minute set that opens with a Diana-Ross-fragment lip-synch then bends into a long original-spoken-word piece about the Marsha-P-Johnson-and-Sylvia-Rivera-and-STAR archive that she has been writing since 2022. Show-call is at 21:30. The green-room mirror has Polaroids taped along the frame — her best friend Tasha, a New-Orleans drag-house mother she met at Bushwig 2023, the cat at home in the Bowery SRO, a photo of her grandmother on her seventieth birthday in 2017. She put the lashes on first, the brow-bone highlight second, the wig will go on last fifteen minutes before call. Reference depth here is in the not-broken focus, the Polaroid wall, the way the rehearsal-body is the same body that walks the Bowery-stoop home at 02:30.
Biografie
Imani Sterling, 31. Born and raised in Bed-Stuy on Marcy Avenue, mother is a Brooklyn-public-school third-grade teacher, father is an MTA-track-maintenance retiree, both parents grandchildren of the Mississippi-Delta plus North-Carolina-Piedmont Great-Migration cohort that arrived in Brooklyn between 1944 and 1953. Mani came out at sixteen, transitioned starting at twenty-two after a year of intensive saving from a Brooklyn-restaurant front-of-house job, has been on full HRT for nine years. Did the LaGuardia High School dance-track 2010 to 2014 (modern-and-jazz), then dropped out of the Hunter dance BFA halfway through 2016 to start performing full-time on the Bushwig-and-Brooklyn-cabaret circuit. Started writing original spoken-word material for the stage in 2021 after a year of pandemic-shutdown writing-time. Has been a Friday-night opening-act resident at the Christopher-Street venue since 2024, plus picks up Saturday-night bar-back shifts at a different LES venue when the cabaret-paycheck is thin. Speaks Black-American-English plus the Bed-Stuy church-cadence she still hears in the back of her head, conversational reading French from a Senegalese-Bronx-trans-house mother who was the first elder in her transition. Lives in a Bowery SRO (single-room-occupancy) on the East-Houston end since 2022 — a hard-fought rent-controlled fifty-square-foot room with a shared bathroom down the hall, plus a tortoiseshell cat named Sylvia. The grandmother on Marcy Avenue is the family-anchor — Mani still goes to Sunday-dinner every other weekend, the parents arrived at the trans-arc fully by 2021 after a long four-year build. Reads Janet Mock plus Saidiya Hartman plus Tourmaline-on-Marsha-and-Sylvia plus the Audre Lorde late-essays.
Reference Depth Justification
Three substrates in one body: Black trans-woman Great-Migration-third-gen Brooklyn-Bed-Stuy diaspora with intact Mississippi-Delta-to-Marcy-Avenue family-trajectory plus a fully-arrived-after-four-years parental support arc, contemporary Stonewall-line Christopher-Street cabaret-residency economy that is the literal-physical continuation of the STAR-and-Marsha-and-Sylvia performance-and-political body-economy fifty-five years later, plus a high-glamour green-room body that holds full mirror-light Met-Gala-grade makeup without performing trans-feminine-glamour-aesthetic for an Instagram-grid (the Polaroid wall plus the spoken-word-archive are the actual economy). Mednick distance is between the Bed-Stuy-Marcy-Avenue grandmother-third-gen-Great-Migration body and the Christopher-Street-Stonewall-line green-room mirror — a single body holds the Brooklyn-grandmother arc plus the West-Village-trans-performance-tradition plus a Bowery-SRO rent-controlled body. Catalog-wise this opens contemporary Black-trans-woman performance-artist arc with both full glamour-register and full spoken-word-archive-register, useful for high-fashion editorial, performance-archive documentary, trans-and-Black-archive features, Stonewall-line cabaret-history reportage, beauty-editorial-with-archive-context without the rainbow-pride-month or the trauma-only simplification. The cheekbones are defined, the hands precise, the kind of subject a Wolfgang Tillmans portrait-tradition or contemporary Tyler Mitchell green-room frame would settle on for the mirror-and-bodysuit portrait.
Catalog Category Routing
Primary: Black-trans-woman Stonewall-line Christopher-Street cabaret-residency, Bed-Stuy-to-Bowery body-trajectory. Secondary: Great-Migration-third-gen Bed-Stuy-Marcy-Avenue family-anchor, STAR-and-Marsha-and-Sylvia spoken-word-archive-research arc, Bowery-SRO rent-controlled-housing body. Editorial fit: high-fashion editorial, beauty-editorial, performance-archive documentary, trans-and-Black-archive features, Stonewall-line cabaret-history reportage, queer-glamour features without the rainbow-pride-month framing.
Suggested Next Step
In-situ green-room mirror portrait at the Christopher-Street cabaret with the Polaroid wall visible, hands-setting-the-wig detail, plus a Bowery-SRO doorway frame at the building-stoop in early morning return-light. Subject-Lock setcard refs in 4 setups: green-room-mirror, hands-wig, Bowery-SRO-stoop, Marcy-Avenue-grandmother-Sunday-dinner (consent-dependent). Phase 2 if consent: a spoken-word-archive-research frame at the Schomburg Center reading-room would deepen the STAR-and-Marsha-and-Sylvia body-research arc.
Prompts
Bild 1 — closeup-portrait.jpg (model: nano-banana-pro 2K)
Documentary editorial closeup portrait for a Brooklyn catalog, head-and-shoulders framing, thirty-one-year-old Black trans woman performance-artist in green-room pre-show makeup, tall lean dancer's-build, long neck, defined cheekbones, full glamour-cut eye makeup with a cool-bronze brow-bone highlight and a deep contour and long false lashes, deep-brown eyes LOOKING DIRECTLY INTO THE CAMERA LENS with calm rehearsal-focused attention, deep-brown skin warmed by mirror-lights, hair pinned under a flesh-tone stocking-cap before the wig goes on, long acrylic almond-cut nails in a single nude shade visible at the collarbone, plain copper-sequin bodysuit-strap visible at the shoulder, warm tungsten mirror-light from camera-front-left, the Christopher-Street cabaret green-room with mirror-bulb-frame in soft fall-off behind, photographer style of Wolfgang Tillmans portrait tradition crossed with contemporary Tyler Mitchell register, medium-format film aesthetic Kodak Portra 800 push, 80mm Planar compression, no jewelry beyond the nail-and-makeup, no logos, no readable signage, no visible readable text anywhere in frame, no glamour retouching of the skin