Zero-Gi

Zero-Gi is a New York rope artist and, with the rigger Sam Jay, one half of NYC Shibari. The duo’s site describes her as the team’s rope model and co-creative lead, most often on the bottom side of the rope but sometimes tying, and also as a self-suspension performer.

Rope career

In a 2020 interview reproduced on the NYC Shibari site, Zero-Gi said she came to the kink community through FetLife and a consent and negotiation event on Long Island, then started bottoming and self-tying almost at once, practicing every day; at the time of the interview she counted about two and a half years of dedicated rope work. The same interview dates her rope partnership with Sam Jay to around late 2018.

NYC Street Shibari and performance

The pair are known for NYC Street Shibari, a project with the photographer DirtyArchangel that began in 2018 and stages suspensions in public spaces: from Bow Bridge and the Bethesda Arches in Central Park, at Gantry Park and along the FDR Drive, and a tie performed in the rain at Lincoln Center. In the 2020 interview she recalled being suspended from scaffolding during the previous year’s NYC Pride parade. The team says its public work is meant as performance art that audiences can accept rather than be shocked by, and that it keeps public suspensions non-sexual and collaborative, without power-exchange scenes. Their work won awards in the 2020 Jade Rope photo competition for photography, modeling and rigging, and they gave a two-part interview to the Rope Podcast.

Their site lists live performances including a Torture Garden promotion in 2023 and a jute performance titled “No Standing” at Radio Hall in Osaka. Since at least 2025 they have performed regularly in the Lust Caution cabaret series at The Red Pavilion in Bushwick, where Zero-Gi appears both with Sam Jay and in solo self-suspension sets. NYC Shibari also lists editorial and fashion rope for magazines including Numéro, Perfect and Carnale, and an appearance in the FX series Dying for Sex.

Teaching

NYC Shibari offers classes, demonstrations, intensives and workshops from introductory to specialized level, private instruction at a studio in the New York area, and workshops elsewhere by arrangement. In 2026 Zero-Gi and Sam Jay taught at Coil & Cord in Brooklyn, with workshops on a yokozuri transition sequence and on traditional hashira suspension, and a three-part series on boxed takate kote variants called Shin Gote, Gyō Gote and Sō Gote. The duo’s site says there is no single correct style of rope and that both sexual and non-sexual rope partnerships are valid when they are consensual.