PHILADELPHIA — Dito van Reigersberg, 53, of South Philadelphia, the trailblazing drag queen who famously performed as Martha Graham Cracker, died on Monday, June 1, after a yearslong battle with multiple forms of cancer.

Van Reigersberg died at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania’s Clifton Center for Medical Breakthroughs in Philadelphia from complications following a 2023 bone marrow transplant operation that affected his respiratory system.

His death was confirmed by his husband, ballet dancer and choreographer Matthew Neenan.

He said the room was full of van Reigersberg’s loved ones, including his 85-year-old mother, Stephanie van Reigersberg, and his sister, Alexia Bastiaansen.

“He had the most glorious exit I think anyone could ever have, and that’s a testament to him. … People were singing, playing music, talking to him,” said Neenan, 51, who lives in their East Passyunk home.

“He totally knew we were there. He felt it,” Neenan said.

Longtime family friend David Devan, former head of Opera Philadelphia, was also at the hospital and saw the city light up in rainbows afterward to mark the start of Pride Month.

“It was the first day of Pride Month, and our greatest queer Philadelphian died,” Devan said. “In a moment when so many queer folks are being attacked by our government, to have so much love by the city given to this beautifully queer, unapologetic, celebratory queer artist is giving me joy today.”

“He brought a lot of joy and brilliance and demented creativity to our city,” said state Sen. Nikil Saval, D-Philadelphia. “He exudes the spirit of our city, and we’re lesser for having lost him, but so much greater for having had him.”

Dito van Reigersberg was born in Washington in 1972 and raised in Virginia. He graduated from Swarthmore College in 1994 and moved to Philadelphia soon after. He also trained in New York at the Neighborhood Playhouse and the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance.

In 1995, van Reigersberg co-founded Pig Iron Theatre Company with Dan Rothenberg, Quinn Bauriedel and Suli Holum, creating a distinguished experimental theater and school focused on interdisciplinary theater and boundary-pushing performance art.

The writer, actor, teacher and theater maker was named a 2002 Pew Fellow alongside Rothenberg and Bauriedel.

“Dito was part of the very lifeblood of Pig Iron,” Rothenberg, co-founder and co-artistic director of the Olde Kensington-based theater organization, said in a statement. “Back in the 90s, he said he wanted to make ‘experimental theater with a heart.’ So we did. And he carried the torch for that heart through all that we made together. So much of what I am proud of, so much of what makes the energy around Pig Iron’s collaborations unique — it is without question due to Dito."

A few years later, in 2005, van Reigersberg began performing in drag as Martha Graham Cracker, a witty and sarcastic rock star. Known as “the tallest and hairiest drag queen in the world,” Martha was a pioneering performer throughout Philadelphia with the Martha Graham Cracker Cabaret band, including pianist Victor Fiorillo (band co-founder and manager), drummer Ned Sonstein, guitarist Rich Hill, bassist Andrew Nelson, and stylist Max Brown.

“We got so much fan mail just talking about how a Martha show changed somebody’s life, whether it was that they found the power to get out of a bad relationship, or something Martha said inspired them in some way,” said Fiorillo, who lives in West Philly and is a reporter at Philadelphia Magazine. “We had so many people who were dying of cancer, who would come to see a Martha show, right after they’ve done their round of chemo, and they knew they were dying. They were depressed, they were despondent, and for two hours they would forget all of that and smile, or cry.”

For 15 years, the band performed monthly at L’Étage in Queen Village, where Fiorillo said Martha was an unpredictable and unparalleled stage presence.

“Dito was just an amazing performer on every level, but we didn’t have any idea what he was about to do at any moment … and I don’t think he knew, either,” Fiorillo said. “He was a master of crowd work, so he would spend half of the show in the crowd, among the people, doing Pilates on the bar while he’s singing a song [or] sitting on a woman’s lap and rifling through her purse and finding embarrassing things in it — and it really worked.”

“He’s changed so many people’s lives,” Neenan said. “If you could name saints in the theater world, there would be a St. Dito.”

As Martha Graham Cracker, van Reigersberg performed on various sold-out stages across the city and frequently collaborated with arts organizations including the Philadelphia Orchestra, Opera Philadelphia, and the Bearded Ladies Cabaret. Martha’s shows traveled as far as Lublin, Poland, and Colorado Springs, Colorado, as well as New York City’s Joe’s Pub.

“Dito, or Martha, was one of the most singular artists I have ever had the pleasure of performing with. There was simply no one else like her,” said Philadelphia Orchestra music and artistic director Yannick Nézet-Séguin in a statement.

“Dito’s character had this extraordinary gift for holding joy and sharp, cutting truth in the same breath, and the room always responded to it. I cannot overstate what it meant to have her join us at the Philadelphia Orchestra and feel that energy fill the hall. Philadelphia has lost one of its most dazzling hearts, but Martha’s spirit remains with us forever.”

In 2010, van Reigersberg was named a USA Knight Fellow and, for decades, he received numerous awards for his theater productions, most recently in 2025, when his show "Poor Judge," featuring the music of Aimee Mann, won three Barrymore Awards including outstanding overall production of a musical.

The show was a quirky and layered ode to Mann’s music, which van Reigersberg said helped him through the 2020 pandemic lockdown and his cancer diagnosis.

In the summer of 2021, van Reigersberg was diagnosed with stage 1 of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, according to Neenan. The couple married shortly after he began his first round of chemotherapy.

Van Reigersberg went into remission by early 2022 but later that year was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia. Following another round of chemotherapy treatments, he received a bone marrow transplant in 2023 that appeared to improve his condition.

He was able to return to the stage with the premiere of "Poor Judge" at the 2024 Fringe Festival and last year’s raucous show celebrating 20 years of Martha Graham Cracker at the Miller Theater.

“Those couple of years [when he was in remission] were so joyful, just to see him perform again as Martha,” said Jim McGuinn, program director and host for WXPN, who was playing some of Martha Graham Cracker’s music on-air in memoriam on Tuesday.

“He literally was that center-of-the-room kind of person, where you were just drawn into him as a performer onstage, and also in person.”

During that comeback, Martha performed as Jesus in a FringeArts production called "Jesus Drag Superstar," which led some people to protest the show, calling it “blasphemous.”

In a 2021 Facebook post, van Reigersberg pushed back on the idea that drag could be inherently harmful to anyone:

“Drag connects us to pride, to each other, and to our humanity. It upends the norms of gender and allows for us to push at the limits of our ordinary lives,” he wrote. “It gives us permission. It tells people that it’s OK to be unusual, giving visibility to people who might feel unseen and creating a precious sense of community, of shared playfulness and joy. I believe this so strongly that I sometimes forget that people can see drag as harmful.”

To FringeArts CEO Nell Bang-Jensen, that response was “just another example of Dito leading with love and using artistry as activism,” she said. “His presence as a drag queen, you know, is inherently political, and I think he just stood in that presence … saying, ‘This is who I am.’”

By the fall of 2025, Mr. van Reigersberg performed in an off-Broadway production of "Oratorio for Living Things" that the New York Times called “profoundly strange and overwhelmingly beautiful.”

Another production of "Poor Judge" ran at the Wilma Theater in January of this year. Van Reigersberg was initially set to perform, but had to step away to address medical complications from his bone marrow transplant.

Neenan said his husband’s health began declining as he received a diagnosis of post-transplant lymphoproliferative disorder and graft-vs.-host disease that affected his lungs.

“Dito’s work and humanity transcended identity, artistry, and the boxes we are so often placed in,” said Val Gay, chief cultural officer and executive director of the city’s arts office, Creative Philadelphia.

“Over the years, I admired his extraordinary musicianship, performance artistry, and rare ability to make everyone in a room feel seen and loved.”

Even through those difficult final months, Neenan said, van Reigersberg stayed optimistic. “He taught me so much, like how to rise above the chaos and stay true to yourself, and to still show people kindness and warmth,” he said.

“He passed away in front of 40 to 50 people looking at him — he went with a full audience," Neenan said. “He even flatlined at zero, and then he went back up to like 52, so we were like, ‘Oh, my gosh, he’s having an encore.’”

Besides his husband, mother, and sister, van Reigersberg is survived by a brother-in-law, Stephen Bastiaansen; nephews Luke and Eli Bastiaansen; an aunt, Susie Wehner; and a cousin, Soren Wehner.

A memorial will be announced at a later date.

———

(Staff writers Dugan Arnett, Peter Dobrin, and Dan DeLuca contributed to this article.)

———

©2026 The Philadelphia Inquirer. Visit inquirer.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.