BIOS

Stephanie Alvarado is a queer gender nonbinary disabled antidisciplinary artist, poet, archivist, photographer, facilitator and cultural organizer for 20 years. Stephanie was born and raised in the Bronx, NY by way of Guayaquil, Ecuador. They alchemize photography, feminist performance, community based photo archiving, and political education into community building and social justice practices in public spaces for people of color. Their work is rooted in spiritual community healing, social justice, and local memory. They host intergenerational photo archiving teach-ins on public park land and community gardens to reclaim public space as cultural reparations for Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities.

Stephanie has held artist residencies and fellowships at Wave Hill Public Garden and Cultural Center, The Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, Witness for Peace, and The Laundromat Project. They’ve had poetry readings at Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Garden, Pregones Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, and Kelly Street Garden. They have facilitated retreats for the NYC Network of Worker Cooperatives and been an adjunct professor at Hunter College School of Social Work. They currently serve on the Board of Directors for The Literary Freedom Project. Their work was recently published in Korea Art Forum’s Shared Space, Shared Dialogues artist catalog. Stephanie received their BA from NYU in Psychology, Latino Studies, and Public Policy and her MA in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Emory University. 

Lia T. Bascomb is an Associate Professor in the Department of Africana Studies, and affiliated with the Institute for Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at Georgia State University.  She is trained as an interdisciplinary Black studies scholar with emphases in diaspora theory, cultural theory, visual culture, performance studies, gender and sexuality, and literature. Her scholarly interests focus on representations and performances of nation, gender, and sexuality across the African diaspora with an emphasis on the Anglophone Caribbean. She has published in journals such as Meridians, Souls, Palimpsest, Anthurium, Antipode, and the Black Scholar, and her book, In Plenty and In Time of Need: Popular Culture and the Remapping of Barbadian Identity, is part of the Critical Caribbean Studies Series at Rutgers University Press.

Tasha Dougé is a Bronx-based, Haitian-infused artist, artivist & cultural vigilante. Her body of work activates conversations around women, advocacy, sex, education, societal "norms," identity and Black pride. Through conceptual art, teaching, and performance, Dougé devotedly strives to evoke empowerment for women and illuminate the contributions of Black people, declaring that her "voice is the first tool within my art arsenal." She has been featured in The New York Times, Essence and Sugarcane Magazine. She has shown nationally at RISD Museum, The Apollo Theater & Rush Arts Gallery. Internationally, Dougé has shown at the Hygiene Museum in Germany. She is an alum of the Laundromat Project's Create Change Fellowship, The Studio Museum of Harlem's Museum Education Program, Haiti Cultural Exchange’s Lakou Nou residency, the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute’s Innovative Cultural Advocacy Program and their inaugural Digital Emerging Artist Retreat.

Beverly Guy-Sheftall is the founding director of the Women’s Research and Resource Center (1981) and Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women’s Studies at Spelman College.  For many years she was a visiting professor at Emory University’s Institute for Women’s Studies where she taught graduate courses in Women’s Studies.  At the age of sixteen, she entered Spelman College where she majored in English and minored in secondary education.  After graduating with honors, she attended Wellesley College for a fifth year of study in English.  In 1968, she entered Atlanta to pursue a master’s degree in English; her thesis was entitled, “Faulkner’s Treatment of Women in His Major Novels.”  A year later she began her first teaching job in the Department of English at Alabama State University in Montgomery, Alabama.  In 1971 she returned to her alma mater Spelman College and joined the English Department.

She has published a number of texts within African American and Women’s Studies which have been noted as seminal works by other scholars, including the first anthology on Black women’s literature, Sturdy Black Bridges:  Visions of Black Women in Literature (Doubleday, 1980), which she coedited with Roseann P. Bell and Bettye Parker Smith; her dissertation, Daughters of Sorrow:  Attitudes Toward Black Women, 1880-1920 (Carlson, 1991); Words of Fire:  An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought (New Press, 1995); an anthology she co-edited with Rudolph Byrd entitled Traps:  African American Men on Gender and Sexuality (Indiana University Press, 2001); a book coauthored with Johnnetta Betsch Cole, Gender Talk:  The Struggle for Women’s Equality in African American Communities (Random House, 2003); an anthology, I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde, co-edited with Rudolph P. Bryd, Johnnetta B. Cole, and Guy-Sheftall (Oxford University Press, 2009); an anthology, Still Brave: The Evolution of Black Women’s Studies (Feminist Press, 2010), with Stanlie James and Frances Smith Foster. Her most recent publication (SUNY Press, 2010) is an anthology co-edited with Johnnetta B. Cole, Who Should Be First:  Feminists Speak Out on the 2008 Presidential Campaign. In 1983 she became founding co-editor of Sage:  A Scholarly Journal of Black Women which was devoted exclusively to the experiences of women of African descent. She is the past president of the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017.

Kayla Hamilton is an artist, producer, and educator originally from Texarkana, Texas and now resides in Bronx, NY. Kayla earned a BA in Dance from Texas Woman’s University and an MS Ed in Special Education from Hunter College. She is a member of the 2017 Bessie-award winning cast of the Skeleton Architecture, the future of our world's curated by Eva Yaa Asantewaa. In addition to Skeleton Architecture, Kayla dances with Sydnie L. Mosley Dances and Gesel Mason Performance Projects, teaches master classes around the United States, and is the recipient of Angela’s Pulses’ Dancing While Black 2017 Fellowship. Under the name K. Hamilton Projects, Kayla self-produced numerous projects, organized community events, and wrote arts integrated curriculum throughout NYC. When Kayla is not dancing, she's a special education teacher at the Highbridge Green School who loves to watch Law and Order on Hulu while sipping on peppermint tea.

Joselia Rebekah Hughes is a Mad/disabled/neurodivergent writer and artist living in the Bronx. She’s a poetry co-editor at Apogee Journal. Her writing has appeared in Blackflash Magazine, Ocean State Review, ICA: VCU, The Poetry Project, Split This Rock, Apogee Journal, Leste Magazine, and elsewhere. She’s currently editing her first book, Blackable: A Nopem. 

Sierra King (she/her) is an Atlanta-based artist, photographer, and archivist. Her creative and arts administration work is dedicated to documenting, preserving, and archiving the work of Black women artists. She had the honor of working as lead photo archivist for the Kathleen Cleaver papers before they were acquired by the Stuart A. Rose Library at Emory University. In 2020, King was awarded the Stuart A. Rose Library’s Billops-Hatch Fellowship to continue research for Build Your Archive, an interactive assessment plan to help Black women artists build their archives in real time. She is currently building and preserving the archives of printmaker Jasmine Nicole Williams and film director Ebony Blanding. In the summer of 2020, King made her curatorial debut with here.there.everywhere, a multidimensional portrait of the journey towards Black futurity that Black women across the African Diaspora have been pursuing in the name of freedom, at MINT Gallery. In 2021, she is a Hambidge Cross-Pollination Art Lab Studio Resident and National Black Arts Festival Micro-Grant Recipient. As of September 2022, she is one of 11 Atlanta based artists and scholars to be awarded the Arts and Justice Fellowship by Emory Arts and the Ethics and the Arts program of the Emory University Center for Ethics.

Relevant Links: www.buildyourarchive.com www.sierraking.co 
Instagram: @buildyourarchive Instagram: @sierrachasity 

Adrian Lara schemes with other Centro Corona members to write grants, track money, and record memories. Strip malls in southern California raised them until they moved to New York in 2014. They run on French fries, spreadsheets, pop culture history, and lesbian gossip.

Yessica Martinez is a poet and educator originally from Medellin, Colombia. Having lived in the United States for most of her life, she identifies as an illegalized person who currently holds DACA status. Yessica has worked as a literature promoter, teaching artist and writer in residence in her community of Corona, Queens. She is currently a lecturer in Cornell University’s English department and is working on completing a poetry collection titled “Aircraft.”

Mohagany Foster (she/her/hers) is a passionate activist and advocate for the LGBTQ+ community with a focus on incarcerated and formerly incarcerated transgender individuals. Having lived experiences with incarceration, homelessness, and multiple forms of discrimination, Mohagany seeks to be a voice for those living at the margins of society. Some of her favorite activities include reading, gardening, and traveling.

Dr. Cleo Silvers came to New York City in late 1966 assigned to St. Anselm's Church and the New York City Housing Authority as a VISTA Volunteer (Volunteers In Service To America). By 1967 Cleo Silvers was a community activist in the South Bronx where she had been assigned as a VISTA Volunteer. She became a Community Mental Health Worker and worked with the workers at Lincoln Hospital to execute the first work stoppage/Seizure of the Mental Health Services at Lincoln. The workers with the help of members of the leadership of the Black Panther Party, community members and activist doctors ran the Mental Health Services, designed new programs and changed the quality of care for the better over a one month period.

During that struggle, Cleo was recruited into the Harlem Branch of the Black Panther Party in 1968-69. She worked in the South Bronx Free Breakfast Program, Sickle Cell Anemia information project, sold the Black Panther News, attended Study Group and collaborated with the Young Lords Party on a city wide door-to-door preventative health care screening program. At that time, the BPP leadership, Zayd Shakur, Dr. Curtis Powell, Brother Rashid and others sent her to the Young Lords Party to continue the citywide health care and labor organizing she had begun at Lincoln Hospital. After compiling thousands of complaints at the Emergency Room complaint table, with the help of worked with the Young Lords to plan and execute the second take over of the hospital to demand a change in the quality of care offered to the community. Cleo was also responsible for co-writing the “Patients Bill of Rights” which can now be found (in a significantly watered down version) in every hospital room in the country. In the early 70’s Cleo, as the result of a third takeover at Lincoln Hospital, was the co-founder with Panama Alba of the Lincoln Hospital Drug Rehabilitation Center which is still an internationally, well respected rehab center located in the South Bronx. Also in 1970, Cleo was sent to Detroit by a vote of the members of HRUM to organize in the auto plants and to become a member of the industrial proletariat (hospital workers are service workers and not directly connected to the “means of Production”), and to represent as a member of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and later, the Black Workers Congress. The focus of her work now is on building unity and understanding of our glorious history; so that we can preserve our culture. She is also involved in and expanding the boundaries of the struggle for environmental justice for African-Americans and people of color and fighting gentrification of our neighborhoods and helped build community gardens in the South Bronx.  In June 2010 Cleo became a summa cum laude graduate from Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations and National Labor College Collaborative. Cleo went on to work as a labor organizer with several organizations such as Black Workers Congress. Today, Cleo works as a consultant for the Cossitt Library in downtown Memphis, Tennessee, and Crosstown High School, where she is part of a mentoring program for sixth graders to high school students. Cleo is the 2022 recipient of an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters from City University of New York/Lehman College.

Delphine Sims is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art Department at UC Berkeley where she studies the history of photography in the Americas. Her research theorizes the intersection of Black feminist geographies and landscape photography. Currently, Delphine is the Andrew Wyeth Predoctoral Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts within the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Previously, Delphine was a fellow in the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a curatorial intern at both the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. From 2013 to 2016, Delphine was a curatorial assistant in the photography department at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. In addition to museum catalogs her writing can be found in Matte magazine, The Believer magazine, and Aperture. 

John Stephens is a visual artist who uses photography and writing to tell compelling stories that connect and relate to the human journey. Stephens is originally from Atlanta, GA, and is a self-taught photographer. He pulls his inspiration from spirituality, music, history, literature, and present-day culture. He has been working in his craft for over 20 years and has been voted Best of Atlanta for his professional service for the past 4 years. His work has been displayed in the AfroFuturism Rising exhibition at the Tubman African American Museum. Creatively he is driven by the ethos that, "we are all interconnected in ways that can extend our reach  as artists, but  more importantly as human beings."

Ash Williams (he/him) is a Black non-binary transfemme from Fayetteville, North Carolina. Since 2012, Ash’s work has included theorizing dance and performance art as tools for understanding bodies and corporeality within The Movement for Black Lives; leading rapid response and guerilla actions, particularly as an architect of Charlotte Uprising, which followed the murder of Keith Lamont Scott; and abolitionist organizing at the intersections of gender justice,racial justice, reproductive justice, and anti-carcerality to build alternatives to police and policing. This work has included leading a successful statewide campaign (#EndShacklingNC) to end the practice of shackling pregnant incarcerated people in North Carolina, as well as a successful campaign (#TransferKanauticaNow) to transfer Kanautica Zayre-Brown, a Black Transwoman, from a correctional facility designated for men to a women’s facility. Ash is currently Project Nia's Decriminalizing Abortion Resident. He holds a Master’s degree in Ethics and Applied Philosophy, and a Bachelor’s in Philosophy and a Minor in Dance from UNC-Charlotte. For the last 5 years, Ash has been vigorously fighting to expand abortion access by funding abortions and training other people to become abortion doulas.

Milton Trujillo is a chronically ill artist and community worker raised in Corona and Jackson Heights, living here illegalized for 23 years as a result of displacement. He survives here to create, organize and dream big dreams of radical collective autonomy and solidarity in his communities and beyond with Centro Corona, a local intergenerational and volunteer run community center for and by working class and low income immigrant families of all kinds.  He has been actively organizing in Corona and with Centro since 2015, taking part of its leadership committees and support of Centro’s fundraising efforts, political education, interpretation, crisis response and intergenerational care work as well as being part of artist collectives such as Un Colectivo Recuerda. His craft focuses on experimental, collective filmmaking practices, poetry and other memory work, visual and audio collage making, and story circles. His work is within the frame of popular education and artistic experimentation, observing and reporting as a political practice, where there’s trust for creative frameworks that engage reflections of intimacies with space, story, time and landscape, with the goal to arrive at communal representations of place and historical time.