“ARCANUM” TEAM BIOS
DESIGN TEAM
gabbah baya | Cyber Gallery Architect
Born in 1994 and raised in West Palm Beach Florida, gabbah baya has a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Their upbringing as an Arab American in the United States informs their art through creating alternative narratives and immersive digital environments. As an interdisciplinary worker, using sound, video, and 3D animation, gabbah baya develops a world where multifaceted, sometimes contradictory, realities exist simultaneously. Drawing on issues of intersectionality, they form hyperreal spaces to address gender, race, and international politics. Deconstructing hegemonic symbols, gabbah baya recontextualizes them in the visual vernacular of video games into new spatial, visual, and sonic realities. These realities ultimately critique U.S. perception of the Middle East, using technology to reassert agency and subvert narratives of social and political power.
Natalie Valcourt | Cyber Gallery Architect
Born and bred in NYC, Natalie Valcourt is a User Experience and User Interface designer who gained her Bachelors Degree in Sociology rom CUNY York College in Jamaica Queens, and deepened her understanding of Design and Design theory from Bloc.io UX/UI Bootcamp. She became interested in design as a means of utilizing her innate creativity to have a greater social impact. What Natalie loves most about UX/UI design is that it is creating for solution. Design has a huge impact in our world in that it is used to create the blueprint for everything around us. She designs as a way for people to gain access to technology and other resources not readily available. Through her knowledge of tech and design and background in social work, Natalie advocates for BIPOC owned business, ideas, and content in the digital space.
Andrius Alvarez-Backus | Graphic Designer
Andrius Alvarez-Backus (he/him) is a visual artist, graphic designer, and Programs Associate at Queer|Art, currently pursuing a BFA at the Cooper Union in New York City. His current practice revolves around the Filipinx diaspora and the construction of collective cultural identity, and how that construction is influenced by themes of masculinity and sexuality. Outside of Queer|Art, Andrius serves as a content creator, writer, graphic designer, and consultant for several corporate diversity, equity & inclusion (DEI) agencies across the country. In these capacities, Andrius specializes in intersectional allyship, employee engagement, organizational development, and social justice advocacy in the workplace.
HiFadility | Cyber Gallery Sound Artist
HiFadility is an interdisciplinary artist. The themes of HiFadility’s work encompass subjects of art and science, philosophy and sociology, spiritual and community development. The name Fadil comes from the Arabic language , meaning “one who is generous.” HiFadility then denotes the quality and condition of one who shares in generosity. The name is a title and promise to engage art as an intentional practice—to create with integrity, mindfulness, and to share in truth.
Links: Soundcloud
OPENING RECEPTION TEAM
Andre J. | Opening Reception Guide
Whether making history as the first Black nonbinary model to grace the cover of Vogue Paris in 2007 or giving a self-esteem boost to young girls at New York's Lower East Side Girls Club and LGBTQ youth at Hetrick-Martin Institute, Andre J. believes their greatest accomplishment is “loving the universe, myself and others. Living my dream based on self love, compassion and positive energy. Inspiring all to be true to themselves.”
Raja Feather Kelly | Opening Reception Guide
Raja Feather Kelly is a choreographer, director, and the artistic director of the feath3r theory and New Brooklyn Theatre. A two-time winner of the Princess Grace Award and awardee of a Creative Capital award (2019), Raja is the 2019-2020 Randjelovic/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist at New York Live Arts and an inaugural Jerome Hill Artist Fellow. Over the past decade, Kelly has created thirteen evening-length premieres and six short-format works as well as choreographing extensively for Off-Broadway theatre in New York City, garnering a Breakout Award from SDCF (2018).
Oscar Diaz | Event Technician
Oscar Diaz (they/ella) is a queer and trans artist, cultural producer, and curator radiating f a g g o t r y and deviating towards soft desires. They strive to bear witness, cultivate, and step into world-making that ties heartstrings between all divine presence. Their primary body of photographic work documents communities in joy and resistance, as well as the fluid gestures in between, that atomize movement. As co-curator of @NuLatinx, they challenge the monolithic lens of Latinidad and its extraction of Black, indigenous, queer, and trans folks by highlighting and creating bridges between networks of cultural production across the many lands of people they highlight.
Babilla Collective | Language Interpreters
Established in 2019, we are a collective of Queer/Cuir transfeminist anti-racist language workers who come from experiences of migration and diaspora. We have years of experience working in all areas of social justice and have an intentional commitment to build language justice in cultural work and at the intersection of disability justice. We believe language justice work should be creative and joyful and be nurtured as an integral part of movements that seek liberation and justice.
Links: Instagram
ARCHIVES TEAM
Tracy Fenix | Artist Engagement & Archive Associate, Visual AIDS
Tracy Fenix is a native Tejana cultural memory caretaker, curator and public space organizer and currently the Artist Engagement & Archive Associate at Visual AIDS. Fenix supports local, national and international Artist+ Members and estates with their physical archives and digital collections represented in the Artist+ Registry and the Archive Project. Fenix organizes monthly Artist Member events with archival, curatorial and professional development services, and actively works to strengthen community partnerships with NYC-based archival organizations.
Links: Website
Caitlin McCarthy | Archivist, The LGBT Center National History Archive
Caitlin McCarthy (they/them) is the archivist at The LGBT Community Center in New York. Before joining The Center in November 2017 as its first staff archivist, they worked in Museum Archives at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and earned a Master of Library Science degree, with a concentration in Archives and Preservation of Cultural Heritage Materials, at CUNY, Queens College. McCarthy's work focuses on expanding access and self-archiving strategies in community archives. The LGBT Community Center National History Archive is a community-based archive that collects, preserves and makes available to the public the documentation of TLGBQ lives and organizations centered in and around New York. Through our collections, we enable the stories and experiences of New York’s TLGBQ people to be told with historical depth and understanding.
Links: Website
Cheryl Beredo | Curator of the Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
Cheryl Beredo develops collections that document the history and culture of people of African descent throughout the world, provides instruction and research support, conducts outreach, and manages the daily operation of the Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division. Prior to joining the Schomburg Center, she was Director of the Kheel Center for Labor Management Documentation and Archives at Cornell University. Beredo holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Hawaii at Manoa and MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh.
Links: Website