Artists and Speakers
2016
Friday Performance with J Mase III
"It is My Duty to Spit"
J Mase III is a black/trans/queer poet. A blogger for the Huffington Post, he is author of “If I Should Die Under the Knife, Tell My Kidney I Was the Fiercest Poet Around” as well as “And Then I Got Fired: One Transqueer’s Reflections on Grief, Unemployment and Inappropriate Jokes About Death." As an educator, J Mase has worked with thousands of community members in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada on the needs of LGBTQIA youth and adults in spaces such as K-12 schools, universities, faith communities, and restricted care facilities, among others.
Saturday Co-Keynotes Olympia Perez and Sasha Alexander
Title of keynote: "Whose Going to Give Me Admission"
Presented by: Olympia Perez and Sasha Alexander of Black Trans Media
Saturday March 5, 3:15-4:45, Main Lecture Hall, Franklin Paterson Hall
Olympia Perez is a Afro-Latina Transwoman who was raised in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. She is a poet, healer, multimedia artist, actress, and facilitator invested in decolonizing spaces. She has been organizing since 2006 around the intersections of violence she and her trans and gnc communities of color face, currently working at the Audre Lorde Project, an LGBTSTGNC organizing center for people of color, as the coordinator of Trans-Justice for leadership development. She is awakened by the spiritual force that drives her to dislocate and dismantle the systems that we are subjected to; that oppress the best part of us, and that is to live. Olympias adversity informs the work she does with community, and she is deeply invested in the liberation of all black trans and gnc people of color. Olympia works to restore her spirit from the confines of capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy as a trans warrior. She enjoys adventures with her wife Sasha <3, reading, writing, and her time with cats. She is the Content Director of Black Trans Media, working to shift and reframe the value of black trans people thru media, education, and community building. Her pronouns are Her-She, like the chocolate bar.
Sasha Alexander is a non binary trans mixed race black/asian facilitator, educator, multi-media artist, healer, and community organizer with close to 20 years experience organizing in social justice movements. In 2000 as a youth organizer Sasha founded the first Gay-Straight Alliance in their public high school and went onto to work with GLSEN as National Day of Silence Student Organizing Team New Jersey State Representative, LGBTQA Student of Color Organizing Leader, and Trainer of Trainers. Sasha is a 2008 graduate of Hampshire College, where she received a Community Partnership for Social Change grant and studied transformative justice, community organizing, multi-media video installation, and ethnography. Sasha has worked with lgbt youth, low-income youth, and youth of color as a case manager, employment specialist, program coordinator, and media educator with communities everywhere from Greenfield Massachusetts to Rikers Island NYC and for organizations such as Community Action Youth Program and Tribecca Film Institute, respectively. In 2013, after teaching at the intersections of youth media and social justice for over a decade, and called to action by the murder of 21-year-old Islan Nettles, Sasha Founded and launched Black Trans Media, committed to addressing the intersections of racism and transphobia by shifting and reframing the value and worth of black trans lives #blacktranseverything. Sasha is the membership director at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP) in NYC and works to strengthen the leadership of TGNCI people, specifically low income, formerly incarcerated people, immigrants, and trans people of color. Sasha is married to the most incredible trans warrior Olympia Perez, and loves time on the land, decolonizing everything, abolition, their cat mumia shakur, and movement history. Sasha uses the pronouns he/she/they and insists that you mix it up.
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