Permissible Beauty uses the notion of ‘beauty’ as both a creative starting point and an analytical lens for interrogating the part that heritage has played in celebrating some lives whilst overlooking others. Placing Black queer experience at the heart of a highly collaborative process we will create richly layered portraits of contemporary figures (rendered in photography, oral testimony, performance and sound) out of a process of engagement with historic portraiture held in UK heritage collections. The portraits, brought together in a film aimed at both existing and new heritage audiences, especially people of colour/LGBTQ groups, explores shifting notions of beauty and asks why some expressions are more permissible than others.