Join us for a conversation with Casa Susanna exhibition co-curators Isabelle Bonnet and Sophie Hackett with special guest Diana Merry-Shapiro, who visited Casa Susanna in the 1960s. Betsy Wollheim, whose father belonged to the Casa Susanna community, will join virtually.

From the mid-1950s to the late 1960s, a network of crossdressers found refuge in the Catskills region of New York State at two modest resorts where they could freely crossdress en femme at a time of strictly defined gender roles. Guests used photography to build their femme identities and their network. These snapshots – candid, playful, and at times staged, blending family and fashion photography conventions – have since come to be known collectively as the Casa Susanna photographs. Presented as part of the Casa Susanna exhibition.  

Isabelle Bonnet is a photography art historian, writer and curator based in Paris. 

Sophie Hackett is Curator of Photography at the AGO. 

Diana Merry-Shapiro discovered the Transvestia network and subsequently New York’s Casa Susanna in the 1960s. There she met Katherine Cummings and Gloria, a well-known benefactress of the Casa Susanna community. She then embarked on a brilliant career as a computer programmer at the Xerox Company’s Palo Alto Research Center. As one of the original co-inventors of the Smalltalk programming language, she helped write the first system for overlapping display windows. Diana lives with Carol, her wife of 30 years, in New York City

Betsy Wollheim is the president, co-publisher and co-editor-in-chief of Daw Books, a science-fiction and fantasy publishing house. Her father, Donald Wollheim, was a well-known science fiction writer. After his death, she discovered that he had belonged to the Casa Susanna community, with his wife’s support.