Sam Jay
New York rigger and co-creative lead of NYC Shibari with Zero-Gi, trained at the Osada-ryu-based Melbourne Rope Dojo from 2011, known for the NYC Street Shibari public suspensions and suspension-transition workshops.
Sam Jay, also written Samjay, is a rope rigger, teacher and performer in New York. With the rope model and performer Zero-Gi he forms the creative team of NYC Shibari, whose site lists editorial and fashion rope, live performance, classes and lessons, installation art and life drawing among its work. Presenter bios on the NYC Shibari and Studio Friction sites use he/him.
Background
According to the NYC Shibari site, he found the fetish scene in Melbourne, Australia, in early 2011 and was among the first students of the Melbourne Rope Dojo, which opened that June. His teaching bio says he built his fundamentals at that Osada-ryu-based dojo from 2011 to 2017 and was one of its first five students; in an interview reproduced on the site he named his early instructor there as a licensed Osada Steve instructor and said he gradually left the ryu behind. The bio sums up the change as a decision in 2017 to tie partners rather than styles. He later moved to the United States, first to Boston and then to New York. In the interview he described his main interest as connective floor ties at home, built on empathy and close observation of his partner. The site also traces NYC Shibari’s life-drawing sessions back to his work in 2012.
NYC Shibari and performance
He and Zero-Gi began their rope partnership around 2018. That autumn the photographer DirtyArchangel proposed NYC Street Shibari, a project of suspensions staged in public places in New York, with Sam Jay tying Zero-Gi’s suspensions at sites such as Bow Bridge in Central Park; the pair also performed a tie in the rain at Lincoln Center. NYC Street Shibari won awards in the 2020 Jade Rope photo competition. The site credits the pair with a takate kote and big-toe suspension, which it calls the first documented single-toe suspension, and credits Sam Jay as rigger on editorial work for Carnale, Numéro and Blanc. Studio Friction’s listing describes the duo as known for high-altitude urban suspensions and for fast suspension routines at Torture Garden and burlesque, circus and aerial venues.
Since May 2025 the pair have performed regularly in the Lust Caution cabaret at The Red Pavilion in Brooklyn; the NYC Shibari calendar lists appearances through November 2026.
Teaching
The NYC Shibari bio says the two have taught and performed together since 2020, including abroad, and names EURIX and the Prague Shibari Festival among recent stops. In May 2025 they taught a two-day workshop on dynamic suspension transition sequences at Studio Friction in Denver, covering the danger inherent in suspension in a consent-informed way, their own leg and foot ties, and drops, flips, rolls and swings with adaptations for different bodies. At Coil & Cord in Brooklyn they taught a yoko-zuri transition workshop and an introduction to traditional hashira suspension in July 2026, and in autumn 2026 a three-part takate kote series, “Boxed Set”, built around shin, gyō and sō versions of the gote.