the presenters

Lizi Anderson-Cleary is a PhD student in the History of Art & Architecture department at the University of Oregon. Her research focuses on the intersection of art and politics and decolonial aesthetics in modern Latin America. She holds a bachelor’s degree in history with complementary minors in Spanish and Geography. For her master’s thesis, she examined the avant-garde, humanitarian, and feminist aspects of Mexican-Hungarian photographer Kati Horna’s work during the Spanish Civil War. During graduate school, Anderson-Cleary assisted in the preparation of an anthology of essays written by the professors in the College of Design for publication, interned at Blue Sky, a photography gallery in Portland, and works as a Teaching Assistant. 

Panel: Humor & Performance

Chaz A. Barracks, PhD (he/they) is a mixed-media interdisciplinary scholar, filmmaker, podcast host, and current postdoctoral fellow. He teaches courses on Black popular culture and the politics of Black joy through critical media practice. Dr. Barracks is currently writing a book on the politics of deviance in everyday Black life and wrote and directed Everyday Black Matter, a 2020 film project based in Richmond, Virginia. His research and creative practice are invested in interdisciplinary approaches that center epistemologies of Black joy and refusal, employing storytelling as a method to bridge knowledge gaps relevant to the study of Black queer life in America.

Panel: The Black Quotidian

Bernadette Marie Calafell (PhD, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) is Professor of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon. She is the past editor of the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, a flagship journal of the National Communication Association. She has been named a Distinguished Scholar by the National Communication Association and the Western States Communication Association respectively. She is also former Film Review Editor of QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, for which she is presently editing a special issue on BDSM. Dr. Calafell has co-edited six books, as well as solo authored Latina/o Communication Studies: Theorizing Performance and Monstrosity, Performance, and Race in Contemporary Culture. She is the co-editor with Dr. Shane T. Moreman of the Critical Intercultural Communication series with Peter Lang and the Horror and Monstrosity series through the University Press of Mississippi with Drs. Marina Levina and Kendall Phillips. Her research is focused on queer of color theory, Chicana and Latina feminisms, monstrosity and horror, performance and race, sex work, and BDSM.

Panel: Affect & Ebodiment

Yasmine Espert is an Assistant Professor of art history at York University, and Editor of Interviews and Profiles at Seen — a journal for Black, Brown and Indigenous voices in film, art and visual culture. For Public Books, Dr.Espert recently completed an interview about performance and abolition called “Minimalism Forces You To Imagine: Speaking with Benji Hart and Anna Martine Whitehead.” Similarly, their commissioned essay “On Turtle Island, I learned to be as alive as possible” documents a QTBIPOC artist project for Canada’s National Arts Centre — English Theatre. Dr. Espert recently authored “To risk the sovereignty of our own stories” for The Routledge Companion to African Diaspora Art History. Currently, they’re working on a book manuscript about Caribbean diasporic film for Duke University Press.

Their previous work on the Black diaspora includes “Listening to Revolution” for Artpress, “Can Photography Be Decolonial?” for Public Books, and “Blood, Fire and Interiority in Horace Ové’s Pressure” for Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. For the journal Spectator, they contributed a creative essay on Indigenous and Creole expressions of sovereignty called “Doubout, Kanpe”. Their performance score “Schema” was featured in the collection “Propositional Attitudes: What do we do now?”. Other work is published by the Studio Museum in Harlem, Small Axe, and Oxford University Press. Their research is supported by York University, ACLS, Union Theological Seminary, Columbia University, the University of Michigan, Fulbright, and others. Dr. Espert earned a doctorate in art history from Columbia.

Panel: Eroticism in the Archives

Aracely García-González received her PhD in Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a postdoctoral research fellow at the EDron Center for the Study of America at Princeton University. She is an interdisciplinary feminist scholar; her training is in critical ethnic studies, emphasizing social processes, cultural studies, visual culture, history, and the legacies of US imperialism in the Americas. Her research focuses on the connections between histories of colonialism, global capitalism, gender, and economic vulnerabilities in marginalized communities. Her book-length project, “Flirting with Sexual Economies,” outlines how Latina sexualities and aesthetics reflect US capital accumulation and are integral to how capital moves, particularly in the Americas. 

Panel: BIPOC Quotidian

Jillian Hernandez, PhD, is a curator and scholar of contemporary visual art, popular culture, and style. Her book Aesthetics of Excess: The Art and Politics of Black and Latina Embodiment was published by Duke University Press and her most recent exhibition, Liberatory Adornment: Pamela Council, Yvette Mayorga, Kenya (Robinson),was on view in 2021 at the Flaten Art Museum. A public-facing scholar, Hernandez has launched Full Set Project, a team of researchers who study and document the impact of nail culture (IG @fullsetproject) and the video podcast FEM STUDY on her YouTube channel. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Florida. 

Panel: BIPOC Quotidian

Professor of Fashion Studies and Inclusion at Toronto Metropolitan University, Nigel Lezama is a leading thinker in the field of critical luxury studies. Nigel’s work focuses on decentring and decolonizing perceptions of and practices in luxury by bringing light to the luxurious experiences that are created in Black popular cultural spaces and through Black style. His research in 19th-century French cultural history also re-situates marginalized players—working class women and enslaved and displaced labourers—to the centre of France’s fashion story to rethink the myth of Paris as a global fashion capital. 

Panel: Queer of Color Euphoria

Lizette London (she/her) is an Afro-Pinay Black feminist visual artist and second-year doctoral student in African American Studies at Emory University. Working at the nexus of Black Feminist Thought, Black Queer Studies, and Black Visual Cultures, Lizette seeks to complicate notions of the major Black artistic movements of the 20th and 21st centuries by tracing a new set of genealogies within the visual arts canon. Her work explores the artistic, intellectual, and political practices of Black Queer women image-makers and writers through themes such as self/portraiture, visual literacy, literary theory, and cultural production.

Before Emory, Lizette earned an MA in Black Feminist Visual Arts and Culture from the NYU School of Individualized Study, where she was awarded the e. Frances White Award for her artistic and scholarly achievements, and a BA in Comparative Women’s Studies from Spelman College. Aside from her studies, Lizette enjoys collaborating with other artists to produce independent films, host community art events, and facilitate workshops through her growing artist-maker space, The Lavandula Project – a Black Feminist Visual Arts and Literary Collective & Digital Resource Garden.

Panel: Eroticism in the Archives

Joshua K. Reason (they/them) is a transdisciplinary, multimodal scholar-artist from the Bay Area. Their work details Black : Indigenous performing and visual arts in the Americas as rehearsals for freedom beyond the limitations of modernity. Through ethnography, performance studies, cultural studies, and geography, they write and create towards new grammars for sexuality, intimacy, desire, and erotics. 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. Joshua is currently producing Brazil After Dark, a documentary about Black : Indigenous LGBTQIAPN+ artists in North-Northeast Brazil. As a recipient of the inaugural Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship, they traveled to eight different states in the region and interviewed over twenty artists. This project is an ongoing collaboration with Coletivo das Liliths (Collective of Liliths), an LGBTQIA+ theater group that aims to share the stories of those––past and present––at the racial, gender, sexual, and geographic margins of Brazilian society. In addition to their international work, Joshua serves local queer and trans communities of color. Most recently, they became a project lead for the Black, Indigenous, and Trans of Color Histories Lab, a growing collective of scholars, artists, academics, and organizers based in the United States who create programming, publications, and other initiatives focused on trans of color historywork.

Panel: Affect & Embodiment

 Cristal Alba is a scholar and practitioner specializing in BDSM and pornography. They are currently studying at UCSD as part of the Ethnic Studies PhD program. As a scholar, their current research focuses on the interwoven dynamics of sexual opacity and excess within melanated visual aesthetics and practices. This interest, falls within their larger exploration of the ways that queer embodied practices of sexual alterities transform sociality, relational possibility, and phenomenological inquiry. As a BDSM practitioner and sadist, they pursue the worldly undoing and rebuilding potentials of pain and abjection, tracing the lingering residues of bodily manipulation and transformation. Their erotic film practice seeks to produce tangible archival forms that capture the realities of melanated desires and sexualities. Bringing together these different forms of knowing and being, they thrive on melanated pleasure and community building, curating intentional spaces for sexual conversation and exploration. They have screened their films nationally and internationally as part of various film festivals including the Queer Women of Color Film Festival, San Francisco Porn Film Festival, and the Trans Film Festival Stockholm. Currently, they offer workshops, private sessions, and curate events at Devil Mask Studios in Los Angeles, The Rope Collective in San Diego, and The Ivy in Chicago. In addition, you can see them perform as AJ, for Aorta Film’s Haunted, written by Carmen Maria Machado, to be released Fall of 2025.

Panel: Affect & Embodiment

Jessica Kenyatta Walker is an American Studies scholar exploring food and racialization within everyday cultural landscapes. Her current project explores the cultural mythology of soul food as its articulated through representations of Black women and kitchen spaces. Dr. Walker received her PhD in American Studies from The University of Maryland, College Park and is currently Assistant Professor of American Culture and Afro-American and African Studies at The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Panel: BIPOC Quotidian

Yiou (Max) Yang is an MA student in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. Max’s research investigates how China’s queer communities navigate socio-political landscapes across various media and platforms. Centered on the concept of Ku’er—a phonetic adaptation of “queer”—Max employs queerness both as a critical analytical framework and as a site of resistance against entrenched hetero-patriarchal norms and nationalist ideologies. Building upon a BFA in Photography and an MS in Arts Administration, Max examines emerging queer cultural movements such as Voguing Shanghai (Ballroom culture in China), analyzing how these performative acts reshape identity and community under conditions of censorship. Max’s work emphasizes transnational, intersectional perspectives to preserve and celebrate diverse queer experiences.

Panel: Queer of Color Euphoria

Michelle Yee is an assistant professor of Art History whose research focuses on contemporary Asian American and Asian Diasporic art.  Her research interests include race and representation, transnational connections and collisions, and cosmopolitanisms. Her writing can be found in journals such as Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, Third Text, Panorama, and Art Etc. as well as several exhibition catalogues. At VCU, Yee teaches undergraduate and graduate courses that consider Asian Diasporic and American art and visual culture. She received an MA and PhD in Visual Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz, an MA in Art History from the University of Connecticut, and a BA in Art History and English Literature from Georgetown University. 

Panel: Humor & Performance