Jellika Boom Brings Multimedia Drag Experience to MAD Arts

Jellika Boom, recently named New Times’ Best Drag Performer for 2025, is always striving to push the boundaries of the art form. So when she dreamed up a multimedia museum experience incorporating drag, burlesque, storytelling, and graphic projections, she needed to find a venue with the capabilities to bring her audacious vision to life.

After an extensive search of South Florida venues, she landed on MAD Arts, a tech-forward museum in Dania Beach with mind-bending installations incorporating light design, optical illusions, projections, and, sometimes, artificial intelligence.

“I was looking for museums that utilize projections, but when I stumbled upon MAD Arts — they do more than that," says Boom. "I’d never seen a museum utilize art technology like that — ever."

Much to Boom’s delight, the museum staged her show just as meticulously as they would any other exhibition they display by local, national, and international artists. Boom presented her proposal in March, and the show’s projections and graphics have been in production ever since then. The museum also built her, along with fellow performers Natsh D'Witshes Venom and Sofia Luna, a custom stage and runway.

Inspired in part by Sasha Velour’s NightGowns, Boom’s production, titled “Le Mode,” follows the artistic journey of three artists. Because the show is so different from your standard drag brunch fare, Boom is reticent to share specific details. But she teases: “The show very much is a tunnel into the artistic minds of three individuals who are trying to achieve their artistic bliss.”

Boom has similarly followed her bliss in her own drag career. As the drag performer for Rooftop Cinema’s “Drag Me to...” movie series, and the drag show director at Kendall’s Spanish Marie, she’s known for staging productions well outside the bounds of mainstream drag. In April, she and her fellow Spanish Marie queens performed Lady Gaga’s Mayhem album in its entirety without breaks or intermissions. Boom believes it was the first time such a feat had been attempted in South Florida.

She hopes Le Mode will be similarly groundbreaking. “It’s especially important to support local drag with an event like this because we’re really pushing the boundary and the median of what drag is and what we can do with it,” she says. “This isn’t your run-of-the-mill drag show. This is a very high-concept, high-production show.”

Le Mode. 8 p.m. Saturday, June 28, at MAD Arts, 481 S. Federal Hwy., Dania Beach; 754-239-0707; yeswearemadarts.com. Tickets cost $45 and include access to all museum exhibitions.