Who We Are
AND WHY WE DO THIS
Our House is the brainchild of Cheshire Vineyard and Zoey Black. We blend somatic practice and wellness strategies with the Ballroom Kiki Model as an engaging and impactful mechanism to empower queer and trans people and communities.
For queer and trans people, the body is often a site of trauma, surveillance, and violence, rather than one joy or freedom. Systemic transphobia and the legacy of spatial apartheid restrict not only where we can move but how we inhabit their own skin.
At Our House we choose celebration over spectacle, intimacy over extraction, abundance over scarcity. We depart from narratives that repeatedly frame our communities through pain, displacement and deficit, insisting instead on beauty, softness, humour, style, ceremony and collective care.
We are building the self-efficacy and resilience necessary to thrive abundantly.
YOUR PARENTS
HOUSE MOTHER
CHESHIRE VINEYARD
Cheshire Vineyard is an emerging international talent, a trans-disciplinary artist, and a cultural architect whose work fuses performance, ritual, and queer futurity.
With early career mentorship by FKA twigs, and other formative high budget projects including Honey 3, Nike’s "Do you believe in more?" campaign, as well as being hand selected for the Veuve Clicquot’s Widow Series in Shoreditch, London. From the onset of their career, Cheshire was being groomed to become the culture shifter they are today.
On stage, they were one of The Angels, as part of the groundbreaking South African cast of the critically acclaimed Kinky Boots the Musical at The Fugard Theatre. Most recently, they starred as Tjebolang in The Fugue of Tjebolang by Rehane Abrahams. Completing runs at The South African NAF and Toyota Woordfees 2025.
As a creative director and cultural architect, Cheshire presently leads projects for the District Six Museum and GALA queer archive, under Salon Kewpie: The Legacy Project.
More recent notable collaborations include starring in the campaign for Athi-Patra Ruga's collaboration with Hazendal wine farm. Along with co-producing, as well as opening for Alok Vaid-Menon's most recent show in Cape Town.
Cheshire’s work alchemizes the sacred and spectacular—offering audiences visionary portals into erotic reclamation, mythic storytelling, and expansive queer worldbuilding.
HOUSE MOTHER
ZOEY BLACK
Zoey Black is a queer renaissance and culture architect. She is the foremost documentarian of Ballroom and queer culture in Cape Town, South Africa, working in collaborative practice to archive the queer community with dignity, care, and accountability.
As a disabled, indigenous, queer, transgender woman of colour, her unique work is focused on using creative mediums and cultural platforms as vehicles for social change and is dedicated to advancing queer human rights around the world.
She is the Founder and Executive Director of Gamut 1, a non-profit organisation and creative firm which uses media, culture and research as mechanisms for embodied self-efficacy, resilience, and joy.
Zoey has presented numerous screenings, workshops and discussions at local and international conferences, festivals and events, including the ILGA World Conference, Pan Africa ILGA, CREA ReConference, Encounters South African International Documentary Film Festival, FAME Week Africa, University of Cape Town Film Society, and Open Book Festival South Africa, amongst many others.
She is an alumni of the Berlinale Co-Production Market’s programme (Berlin), Doc Society’s Queer Now lab (New York), Rough Cut Lab Africa’s Filmmaker Programme (Johannesburg) and the International Documentary Film Amsterdam’s IDFAcademy (Amsterdam).
OUR PARTNERS
GAMUT 1
Our primary institutional partner that provides oversight and operational support to the Project.
DANCE FOR ALL
A strategic location that provides a sanctuary of high-quality resources and safety for a dignified experience.
As a community-centred initiative, we partner with those who share our values and want to contribute positively to the impact and sustainability of the programme. Our partners include key organisations and groups to make this programme as effective, engaging and valuable as possible. They are:
HOUSE OF VINEYARD
Provides the leadership, cultural legitimacy and the pedagogical framework of the Ballroom scene.
HOUSE OF BLACK
Serving us trans, femme and intersectional storytelling through visual production, cultural archiving and independent publishing.