Mission Statement:

Why QTLI Matters:

The Queer and Trans Legacy Initiative (QTLI) exists to ignite, inspire, and amplify the voices of 2SLGBTQ+ writers and performers.

We are driven by a simple, urgent purpose: to break through traditional barriers and build a lasting creative home. Through publication, live performance, and community, we connect artists directly with new audiences, industry peers, and each other. QTLI is more than a showcase—it is a movement of mutual empowerment, creative autonomy, and shared pride, dedicated to creating work that reflects the full truth of our lives and building a living legacy that cannot be erased.

A person with glasses operating a professional video camera in a colorful, decorated room with glasses hanging upside down overhead, framed pictures, and various party supplies.
Stage with four speakers talking to audience, large red fabric structures overhead, disco ball, and stage lighting in a dark theater.

Right now, 2SLGBTQ+ content is less desirable to those in mainstream production. The spaces left for us leave few opportunities, and has resulted in mostly sanitized tokenism.

The crisis is magnified now in 2026 by the rise in anti-queer and anti-trans legislation in America, which has trickled down into the social fabric and culture in Canada. We want to make space for the mosaic of untold stories for screen and stage. We want to shine a bright light on 2SLGBTQ+ writers and creators.

The Queer & Trans Legacy Initiative is our refusal to accept erasure.

  • Authentic Reflection: QTLI offers artists and audiences the full complexity, depth, and beauty of our own realities reflected back.

  • Belonging and Pride: Creating art in a system that wasn’t built for us can be deeply isolating. We bring artists, peers, and allies together to build a shared home, fostering pride, artistic confidence, and the undeniable knowledge that our voices belong.

  • Protecting Our Living History: When our stories aren’t published, staged, or recorded, they disappear. We are building a foundation where our words, stories, and histories are preserved.

    QTLI will help bridge the gap between grassroots creators and the broader arts landscape, building relationships, creative achievement, networking, and community care.

Creating our own images. Preserving a legacy.

Creating our own images. Preserving a legacy.

About:

Jo Vannicola is an Emmy Award–winning actor, writer, advocate, a Canadian Screen Award nominee 2023. Their work spans film, television, voice, and stage. Jo’s memoir All We Knew but Couldn’t Say, was shortlisted for the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize in nonfiction 2020, and featured at major literary festivals including the Toronto International Festival of Authors, Word on the Street Toronto, and LitFest in Alberta. Their work has been highlighted by CBC, The Next Chapter, The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Lambda Literary, Xtra, and Bustle Magazine.

Jo is the recipient of the Margaret Trudeau Advocacy Award 2021, the Blaze Award 2020, and the Leslie Yeo Award for their advocacy work. They founded Youth Out Loud, a nonprofit supporting youth rights, and is the founding chair of outACTRAto, the queer and trans actors committee at ACTRA Toronto, instrumental in the creation of the QYS short film competition in collaboration with the Inside Out Film Festival, the guidebook to working with queer and trans actors, and more.

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Why I Started QTLI

"Over the years, I’ve seen so many gifted queer and trans writers and performers struggle in our industry. Our work is often ignored, or it sits in drawers while we work hard for opportunities that never arrive. So few spaces exist for our projects to be produced or recognized. I wanted to create something that would bring us joy, that would validate our hard work, and invite others to participate in the process.

I started The Queer and Trans Legacy Initiative (QTLI) out of a simple need: to provide opportunity where we can share our work, hear a screenplay read out loud by great actors, gather a collection of monologues, create new projects and ideas for transforming our work, and be in rooms with peers, storytellers, filmmakers, shakers, writers, and artists.

QTLI is about about making sure we see our own lives reflected on stage and the page, taking pride in what we make, and ensuring our stories aren't lost or forgotten along the way. We have so many stories to tell."

— Jo Vannicola