Fairy Prince by Halo Starling

​​‘...we call upon Gay Brothers to tear off the ugly green frog-skin of Hetero-male imitation, to reveal the beautiful Fairy Prince hidden beneath.” —Harry Hay, 1979

Halo Starling’s solo exhibition, Fairy Prince, will open downstairs at the ONE Archives in June 2025. The exhibition will present a variety of new work based on his research on the Radical Faeries, particularly the New York Radical Faeries Collection and the Harry Hay Papers at the ONE Archives at USC.

The radical faeries are a loosely affiliated worldwide network and counter-cultural movement seeking to redefine queer consciousness through secular spirituality and ecology. Rejecting hetero-imitation, the Radical Faerie movement began during the 1970s sexual revolution among gay men in the US and is now a thriving LGBTQ+ community with a strong trans contingent. Core to the radical faerie lifeway is stewardship of various land sanctuaries worldwide, operating continuously under a functional anarchy model.

Fairy Prince will explore the concept of sanctuary, a central tenet of the radical faeries. The exhibition space will become a temporary autonomous zone of sorts, a sanctuary, within which visitors can enter “faerie space” and explore some of the items and artwork on display. Projects included in the exhibition will include hand-crafted textile art, collage films, cyanotypes, a collage film and installation, and a zine, mounted alongside archival selections from the New York Radical Faeries Collection and the Harry Hay Papers.

 Halo Starling has been an artist-in-residence at ONE Archives since June 2024. As part of the 2024 USC Libraries Summer Fellowship in Sustainability Studies. This exhibition is the culmination of his year-long work with the collections at ONE Archives. “Fairy Prince” will open on Friday, June 13th, with an opening party, and be on view all summer.

Halo Starling (he/they) is a transdisciplinary artist, worldbuilding regenerative futures in the husk of the capitalist experiment. As a trans and queer immigrant with invisible disabilities, Starling's multi-hyphenate work in moving images, installation, performance, and writing explores what it means to be trapped inside structures that are meant to help you. Starling envisions ways out by building worlds where marginalized people find more resources to fully thrive. Their work asks their viewers to consider: how do we collectively find our way to a regenerative future?

Starling is a second-year Ph.D. student in Media Arts + Practice at USC School of Cinematic Arts, where they are working on film, installation, and writing projects about trans poetic cinema, worldbuilding eco-futurities, and transdisciplinary auto-theory. They are concurrently pursuing the Performance Studies Graduate Certificate at USC Roski School of Art and Design, and the Digital Media and Culture Graduate Certificate at USC School of Cinematic Arts. Most recently, they were a finalist for a 2025 California Documentary Project Grant.

Starling was one of seven inaugural 2021 Circle of Confusion Writers Discovery Fellows, mentored by Lawrence Mattis (The Matrix, The Walking Dead), with their TV pilot, FLOAT. Starling was represented as a writer/director by Lawrence Mattis, Zach Cox, and Casey Minella from 2021–2023.

Starling received their MFA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University in 2021. They were Temple University’s nominee for the Tribeca Film Institute/Sloan Discovery Student Award 2020 with their TV pilot, WELL. Starling’s MFA thesis film, PONY (2022), premiered at TRANSlations: Seattle Trans Film Fest 2022, and was covered in Starling’s chapter in Expanding the Parameters of Feminist Artivism (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2022), which they presented at College Art Association’s 112th Annual Conference in Chicago, 2024.