M Lamar

M Lamar (born May 29, 1972) is an American composer, performer, and artist. He is an operatic countertenor and pianist whose work incorporates film, sculpture, installation, and performance. Lamar is the twin of actress Laverne Cox, and played his sister’s character pre-transition in two episodes of the Netflix show Orange Is the New Black. Early life and career Lamar was born in Mobile, Alabama, and as a child he sang as a soprano in his church’s choir. He studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute and attended Yale for graduate school in sculpture before dropping out to focus on music. In 2014, Lamar participated in an open dialogue with authors bell hooks, Marci Blackman, and Samuel R. Delany called “Transgressive Sexual Practice” as part of hooks’ work as scholar-in-residence at The New School. He has cited the writing of hooks and Toni Morrison, as well as operatic composer Diamanda Galás’s Plague Mass, as inspirations for his work. The work is loosely based on the life and death of Willie Francis, a Black American charged with having murdered a 53-year-old white man at the age of 15; Francis’s case only received significant attention when he survived an attempted exe