Jethro Patalinghug is a Filipino immigrant nonbinary interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, performer, and cultural producer based in San Francisco. Their work moves across installation, sculpture, portraiture, documentary film, projection, performance, drag, and community ritual. Rooted in Filipino diasporic memory, queer and trans resilience, Babaylan ancestral lineage, drag materiality, and decolonial practice, Patalinghug builds transformative queer worlds where glamour becomes visibility, courage, healing, and refusal.

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Patalinghug’s practice explores drag as a survival technology: a language of camouflage, protection, protest, transformation, and communal care. Their earliest understanding of drag came through their mother, Virginia Patalinghug, a political activist during the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines, who used makeup and glamour as camouflage when she was targeted by the military. This personal history continues to shape Patalinghug’s understanding of beauty not as surface, but as strategy, power, and resistance.

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Their work also draws from the legacy of the Babaylan, precolonial spiritual and cultural leaders in the Philippines, many of whom embodied gender-expansive and queer identities. Through this lineage, Patalinghug traces queer Filipino identity beyond colonial shame and contemporary anti-drag rhetoric, reclaiming queerness as a sacred, expansive, and transformative force.

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Their major works include Manghihilot, KAANYAG, Gabriela Rising, Disco Balling Heads, The Performer, and Drag Basketball / Drag Everything Up. In Manghihilot, Patalinghug creates an immersive tentacular drag “virus” that spreads through an entire room, using sequins, synthetic hair, stockings, jewels, corsetry, light, projection, and sculptural excess to imagine contagion not as harm, but as healing, glamour, humor, resistance, and liberation. Their 2026 solo exhibition Manghihilot, presented as the culmination of their Queerly Complex Artist-in-Residency at 465 Collective, is funded by the San Francisco Arts Commission through its Artist Impact Endowment Grant.

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Patalinghug’s documentary work includes 50 Years of Fabulous, a feature documentary on the Imperial Council of San Francisco and queer civil rights history; #MyNameIs, which examines Facebook’s real-name policy and its impact on drag performers, activists, survivors, Native communities, immigrants, and LGBTQ+ people; My Revolutionary Mother, a personal documentary about political memory and family history; and The Long Rescue, an eleven-year longitudinal documentary following the lives of child sex trafficking survivors in Cebu, Philippines, for which they serve as Creative Producer.

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Their film and documentary practice has been supported by major fellowships, labs, and industry programs, including IDFA Producers Connection, Gotham Week, FIFDH Impact Days, DOC NYC Storytelling Incubator, Film Independent CNN Docu-Series Intensive, and the BAVC National MediaMaker Fellowship. These programs have supported their long-form documentary work, impact strategy, and commitment to stories centered on queer communities, immigrant histories, political memory, and survivor-centered filmmaking.

 

Patalinghug has exhibited and presented work at the Chan National Queer Arts Center, Maryland Institute College of Art, Queer Arts Center, Oaklash, SOMArts, and other cultural spaces. Their films have screened at Frameline, QDocs, CAAMFest, Cinemalaya, the Boston Asian American Film Festival, and on PBS. They are a recipient of the San Francisco Artist Grant, the San Francisco Impact Endowment Grant, and the Cultural Leadership Award in Arts and Culture from the San Francisco Immigrant Rights Commission.

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In addition to their studio and film practice, Patalinghug is deeply engaged in queer and trans community leadership. They serve as Vice President of the GLBTQ+ Asian Pacific Alliance and as a board member of Oaklash, and have produced major community events including GAPA Runway, one of the longest-running queer and trans AAPI pageants in the United States. Across their work, Patalinghug creates spaces where queer and trans bodies, immigrant histories, ancestral memory, and drag performance become sites of healing, resistance, and collective transformation.