A Time Out New York "Critics Pick" and a Flavorpill "Editor's Choice", recently featured in BUST.


From barely legal to legally bare, Rhinestone Gorilla Burlesque is New York's ragtag team of art school rejects. Heralded as "dangerous-minded and infectious" and "the future of burlesque" (The San Francisco Burlesque Review), The Rhinestone Gorillas are not your average showgirls; they're rhinestones in the rough, anti-glamour guerilla grrrls prone to attack and entice.

Rhinestone Gorilla Burlesque is Lucida Sans (Producing Director), Debra Delorean (Assistant Producer / Stage Manager), Kinky Demure (Technical Director), Gemma Stone, Angelique A'LaMode, Avian Rush, Izebel Vivant, and Spartacus Rising.

Formerly known as Alpha Psi Ecdysia, Rhinestone Gorilla Burlesque was founded in 2008 as the nation's premier undergraduate burlesque troupe. While based on the campus of the State University of New York at New Paltz, Rhinestone Gorilla lived a double life as an educational institution and a professional producing entity. On the New Paltz campus, Rhinestone Gorilla dedicated itself to teaching burlesque history, the politics of neo-burlesque and the practice of burlesque performance; off-campus, Rhinestone Gorilla was the underage darling of the New York stripperformance art scene, getting naked on school nights at The Slipper Room, Rififi, Public Assembly, and Sugarland and in venues in LA, SF, Boston, and beyond. Though frequent subjects of controversy and police activity, Rhinestone Gorilla's students on the SUNY campus--who have inherited the name Alpha Psi Ecdysia--remain the only state-sponsored strippers in the nation.