Black, Indigenous, &
Trans of Color Histories Lab

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Toni Garcia-Butler (he/they) is a poet and community artist. He believes artists play a unique role as cultural historians. As a poet, Toni strives to connect with others through the intricacies of lived experience. Through facilitation, Toni encourages self-empowerment through DIY publishing, personal narrative, and creative joy. Their work centers their people: Black, Filipino, southern, queer, and everyone existing within the intersections. Find Toni published in Closet Cases: Queers on What We Wear (under former name), {new words press}, beestung mag, and several independent & self-made zines. You can also find him on Instagram (@tgbpoetry), Bluesky (@diybody), and tgbpoetry.com.

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Ida Aronson is a Queer, Two-Spirit non-binary trans person. They are a recent climate migrant, having moved from their southeastern Louisiana tribal areas around Houma, to higher ground two hours away on the western side of the Atchafalaya Basin. They now steward a small farmstead with their spouse- Raccoon Oak Farm. Their focus is on their communities: on the uplifting of, the education around and for, and the support and survival of. They believe in radical love, bodily autonomy, the power of art to enact social change, and working towards collective freedom. More info at: https://rynufe.carrd.co

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Iris Afantchao is an interdisciplinary archivist, writer, library worker and memory worker who can be found in western Massachusetts or Connecticut. Living with invisible disabilities as a Black, queer, genderfluid person drives their desire to find opportunities for community care and question widely accepted public history. Iris largely works to connect people with access points to underrepresented histories through research assistance. Pursuing a BA in Government with an Archives concentration at Smith College catalyzed this historywork formally, followed by a Graduate Certificate in Community-Based Librarianship from Drexel University and a Master’s in Library and Information Studies from the University of Alabama.

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A. Abugo Ongiri is an African American scholar/educator. They live in Portland, Oregon with two tuxedo cats and a well-loved and highly chaotic garden. Along with their wife and four kids, they form a multi-religious family of Rasta, Jewish, and Unitarian Universalist spiritualities. Their academic background is in African American literature and film, global African film, and Ethnic Studies. Their body of work includes the book Spectacular Blackness: The Cultural Politics of the Black Power Movement and the Search for a Black Aesthetic, numerous articles on topics ranging from Perez Prado and Mambo-mania to foster parenthood, and forthcoming projects such as a graphic novel about and gentrification, celebrity, and police violence, and a book about the Queen of Funk Betty Davis.

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Delan Ellington (they/he) earned a master’s degree in public history from Howard University in 2022. Their research has focused on collecting and preserving Black queer DC history, emphasizing spaces like the ClubHouse and ENIK Alley Coffeehouse. Delan has served on the Rainbow History Project's board of directors. They have been featured in documentaries, recognized in the Washington City Paper’s 2021 People Issue, and presented at TEDxFoggyBottom 2022 addressing Trans visibility in archives. Delan has served as an organizer with the Black Youth Project 100, Harriet's Wildest Dreams, and No Justice No Pride, championing housing and aid for trans youth.

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Nathalie Nia Faulk (she/her) is a self-described Ebony Southern Belle based in New Orleans. Her work blends performance, History, Healing Justice, and Cultural Organizing. Currently, she serves as Co-Director of Southern Organizer Academy, Co-Director of Last Call Oral History Project, and as the Cultural Organizing Programs Manager for Alternate ROOTS. She serves on the Boards of Transcending Women, BreakOUT!, LOUD Queer Youth Theatre, and PFLAG NOLA. She has performed across the country in Alleged Lesbian Activities, Personal Space, and InFringe Fest. Nia believes everyone is inherently valuable and beautiful and collectively, we can manifest everything!

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Alejandrina M. Medina is an experimental writer whose work theorizes state power, aesthetic production, and sensorial knowledge through 20th and 21st Century Latinx/Latin American music, sound, and performance. She holds a BM in Performance Studies from Lawrence University and is pursuing a PhD in Integrative Studies with an emphasis in Critical Gender Studies at UC San Diego. Her dissertation on LOUDNESS is a love letter to depressed trans Latinas who feel like they’re too much. She sits on the executive board of Proyecto Trans Latinas. She can usually be found yearning queerly, with her cat María Carmen, or singing a bolero at karaoke—ideally all three.

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Joshua K. Reason (they/them) is a transdisciplinary, multimodal scholar-artist from the Bay Area. Their research and creative work are rooted in a fervent commitment to connect the aesthetics, longings, and political strivings of Black communities across the Americas. Their work has been published in The Black Scholar, The Journal of American Culture, The Journal of Black Sexuality and Relationships, and becoming undisciplined: a zine. In addition to finishing their PhD in Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Joshua is producing a documentary about Black : Indigenous LGBTQIAPN+ artists in Northern-Northeastern Brazil.

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fabian romero (P’urhépecha) is an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Studies and affiliated faculty in American Indian and Ethnic Studies at the Ohio State University. Fabian’s work explores the manifestations of colonial heteropatriarchy in contemporary mestizo P’urhépecha heritage family structures in Michoacán and the diaspora. You can find their work in Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, Untangling the Knot: Queer Voices on Marriage, Relationships & Identity, Writing the Walls Down: A Convergence of LGBTQ Voices, and their self-published chapbook Mountains of Another Kind.

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GVGK Tang is a public historian, digital humanist, and media scholar. GVGK has served as a researcher for the Smithsonian, National Endowment for the Humanities, John J. Wilcox, Jr. LGBT Archives, and Historical Society of Pennsylvania. GVGK has been published by Oxford University Press, The American Archivist, and UCLA Design Media Arts. GVGK has served on the National Council on Public History’s Inclusion and Long Range Planning Committees, and co-chaired the Society for Queer Asian Studies. GVGK organizes The T4T Project (a zine by/for/about trans artists & storytellers of color) and Kin/Folk/Lore (a community-led oral history project in Philadelphia). Connect @gvgktang and gvgktang.com.

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