Río Sofia, Co-Director, Programs & Operations

Río Sofia (she/her) is a visual artist, arts worker, and grassroots organizer. She joined Queer|Art in 2018 and became Co-Executive Director in 2023, piloting a shared leadership model that engages a national network of 300+ alumni artists who actively shape the organization's mission and programs. Río is a founding member of Body Hack, a party and mutual aid initiative celebrating trans communities internationally. Her work has been presented at institutions including The New Museum, Princeton University, Rutgers University, and HONCHO, and was recently published in MOTHA's book Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects. She is on the Board of Directors of the Queer Nightlife Community Center and is currently pursuing a Masters in Painting at Bard College.

L Marmon, Co-Director, Finance & Fundraising

L Marmon (they/them) is a white queer disabled artist and arts administrator based in Philadelphia, PA. They support non-profit operations through fundraising strategy, grants management, and donor/government relations. In addition to working as a consultant, L has worked on staff for the Museum of the City of New York and The Civilians. They are also a former/forever theatermaker with extensive performance and production experience. L received a BA in Theater and Music from GWU and studied arts and culture strategy through executive certificate programs at CUNY and UPenn. L is affiliated with Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, the Association of Fundraising Professionals, and Culture@3, and they are engaged in communities of practice in emergent strategy and community-centric fundraising.

Andrius Alvarez-Backus, Communications Manager

Andrius Alvarez-Backus (he/him) is an interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, drawing, and painting. Through the transformation of everyday objects, he amplifies their poetic connotations to evoke personal allegories of intimacy, embodiment, and memory. Using mixed media assemblage, his practice interrogates how desire bridges beauty and abjection, and how the semiotics of materials convey cultural meanings. He received his BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (2023), and his MFA from Columbia University (2025). His work has been shown internationally at the Wallach Art Gallery, Fragment Gallery, SK Gallery, Plato Gallery, Chelsea Walls, Black Brick Project, the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition, and The Blanc, among others. His first museum solo exhibition, "Desastre!," was on view at the Fitchburg Art Museum from June through August 2023, where his work is also included in the permanent collection. Recent honors include the Richard Lewis Bloch Memorial Prize, the Martin A. Rothenberg Travel Fellowship, the D'Arcy Hayman Scholarship, and the Quinta Carolina Scholarship. He was the inaugural Nicholas Dahl Visiting Artist at the Provincetown Art Association & Museum in 2025, and will be an artist-in-residence at Smack Mellon from 2025-2026.

Ita Segev, Resourcing & Partnerships Manager

Ita Segev is a transfeminist and anti-Zionist Brooklyn based writer, performance artist and organizer from Jerusalem attempting to build liberatory bridges between contexts, movements and geographies.

Ita has written essays for Them Magazine, Atmos, Lenny Letter and the recent book ‘Questions to Ask Before Your Bat Mitzvah’ edited by Morgan Bassichis, Jay Saper, and Rachel Valinsky and published by Wendy's Subway. You can also read/hear more about her work on OUT Magazine, Brooklyn Rail, MIT’S TDR/The Drama Review, Disillusioned podcast or in theaters, protests and fundragers across NYC in real time.  

As a performance maker, Ita’s work has been supported and/or presented by institutions/foundations such as New York Theater Workshop, Gibney, Foundation of Contemporary Art, Mertz Gilmore, New York Live Arts, Woman & Performance, La MaMa and Brooklyn Arts Exchange. She performed with company 600 HIGHWAYMEN at The Public Theater, Woolly Mammoth Theatre, PuSh Festival in Vancouver, MESS Festival in Sarajevo, Noorderzon Festival in Groningen and many more. She acted in an audio play By Shakina titled ‘Chonburi International Hotel and Butterfly Club’ co-produced by the Williamstown Theater Festival and available on Audible worldwide.

Ita has facilitated workshops, talked on panels and/or been a guest teaching artist at Harvard University, Columbia University, NYU, Hunter College, the University of Memphis and in different queer, trans and Palestine solidarity movement spaces. 

She has worked with artists, cultural organizations and grassroots collectives, moving millions of dollars to her almost exclusively BIPOC and/or queer & trans and/or Disabled clients, including: G.L.I.T.S; CallActivit; Doll Invasion; Circle O; Movement of the People Dance Company; Embraced Body; Del Vaz Projects; Hyp-ACCESS; The R.O.A.D Project; Trans Equity Consulting and many other individual artists and organizers. Find her on Instagram at @itaqt

Reya Sehgal, Programs & Operations Manager

Reya Sehgal (they/them) is a multidisciplinarian whose work spans performance, writing, curating, and cultural programming. Reya has contributed to exhibitions at SFMOMA/YBCA, BRIC, Project for Empty Space, Brown University, Humanities Action Lab, and the Queens Museum; they have also led research projects on narrative inclusion in (visual) media at Paramount and Getty Images. They served as the 2017-2019 Visual Culture Fellow at the International Center of Photography, where they developed public programs and hosted the series "Optics: New Ways of Seeing Contemporary Culture." Reya's creative work centers on the performative limits of diversity discourse, and the development of imagination in collective practice. As a member of the DIVERSITY FELLOWS! performance collaborative, Reya was a 2016-2017 Diversity Fellow at RISD, and took part in residencies at the Sedona Summer Colony and Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. They have also performed at SFMOMA, Performa 13, Dumbo Arts Festival, Arab American National Museum, Metro Pictures Gallery, Center for Performance Research, Abrons Art Center, Drama League, Performancy Forum, AS220, UC Davis, and Columbia University. Reya received an MA in Public Humanities from Brown University, and BA in Postcolonial Urbanism and Theater/Performance Studies from UC Berkeley; they are currently training to become an intimacy director for stage and film. Based in Mexico City and sometimes NYC, Reya works in real places, and also on the internet.

ankita, Executive Assistant

ankita is an experimental performance artist invested in storytelling where content dictates genre and betrays expectation. They hold degrees in Dance and Anthropology and are regularly presenting performance and film work (inter)nationally. Alongside their artistic practice, ankita writes for thINKing DANCE and has managed award-winning theater companies, shows, and organizations, which rounds out their understanding of the arts industry. Throughout their different capacities, ankita unpacks systems and symptoms of power from a queer, punk solidarity-based lens that rehearses freedom in body and mind. They are excited to be a part of a community of like-minded thinkers at Queer|Art! Learn more at their website: ankitacreates.space

Zefyr Lisowski, Literature Field Coordinator

Zefyr Lisowski is the author of Uncanny Valley Girls, an essay collection about horror movies, exes, and intimacy (Harper Perennial 2025). A 2023 NYFA/NYSCA Fellow in Nonfiction and 2023 Queer|Art Fellow, she’s also the author of two poetry collections, Girl Work (Noemi Press 2024) and Blood Box (Black Lawrence 2019). Raised in the Great Dismal Swamp, North Carolina, Zefyr lives in Brooklyn and has seen grave robbers twice.

Nile Harris, Performance Field Coordinator

Nile Harris is a director and performer of live art. He is the director of his New York based theater company Social Security and is on the Board of Directors of The Chocolate Factory Theater (Queens, NY). 

viento izquierdo ugaz, Visual Art Field Coordinator

viento izquierdo ugaz (they/he) is a transdisciplinary artist, cultural organizer, poet & language justice worker. Through writing, photography & moving image they address how the burden of imposed migration has woven its threads into the visual tapestry of their lineage. They are a co-organizer of BODYHACK, a NY mutual aid happy hour for trans & nb people, and TRANSMISSION, NYC’s first trans music festival. Izquierdo is a 2020-21 Poetry Project Curatorial Fellow and a 2021-22 Leslie Lohmann Museum and EmergeNYC fellow. Their first chapbook is Estoy Tristeza (No Dear, 2018).

Catching On Thieves, Film Field Coordinator

Catching on Thieves is from West Palm Beach, Florida. Her former parents immigrated from Kingston, Jamaica and Lahore, Pakistan. Her high school was a stone’s throw from Mar-a-Lago. She first learned about being trans from online porn and the film The Crying Game. While her heart belongs to the cinema, she is polyamorous about her practice, working with drawing, sculpting, painting, music and performance, whatever gets the job done. Currently she is working with her mentor Lilly Wachowski on a modern feature-length adaptation of Filibus: The Air Pirate (1915), about a gender-bending jewel thief who flies around in a steampunk dirigible. 

Catching has been in residence at the Queer Materials Lab, Translab, The Performance Intensive, PAPA, PAAFF, the RAW Materials Academie and the Queer Art Mentorship program. Catching received her BFA from The Cooper Union in 2011 and MFA from UPenn in 2024, winning the Charles Addams Prize, awarded to the graduate whose work has the most potential to change the world.

Evan Scott, Newsletter Editor

Evan Scott (he/him) has worked in New York City at the intersection of non-profits, communications, art, and design for 10 years. He's edited the monthly newsletter for Queer|Art since 2016, and previously served as Program Coordinator for Cinema Conservancy. Since 2017, he's worked at The Noguchi Museum, currently as the Director of Retail and Merchandising.

Lisa Marie Alatorre, Organizational Development Consultant
via Community Jewelbox

Lisa Marie is a community organizer, educator, and writer with over 20 years experience fighting for the abolition of imprisonment, policing, and oppression as a response to social problems and instead shifting towards care, healing, and transformation. She has formerly worked with movement organizations such as the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness and Critical Resistance and is currently a part-time lecturer in the Crime and Justice Studies Department at UMass Dartmouth. She is a Queer Femme of Indigenous, Mexican, and Jewish descent. Born, raised, and a descendant of Tohono O’odham and Hohokam people and land known as Maricopa County, Az., she is currently settled on Coastal Salish land known as the Key Peninsula, WA.

Arts FMS

As a financial management firm that integrates with nonprofit arts organizations, Arts FMS empowers organizations to focus on their mission while they focus on the long-term fiscal health and sustainability of the organization. By providing a comprehensive scope of full financial management services, Arts FMS is able to bring stability, efficiency, and reliability to an organizations’ financial operations. Principals, Andrea Nellis and Lucy Mallett, bring decades of nonprofit financial experience and believe art is vital to our society and core to the Arts FMS mission. As practitioners and advisors in the nonprofit arts field, their focus is to strengthen the sector and secure the present and future of their clients.

Lola Flash
President

Lola Flash (she/her) is a Visual Art Mentor with Queer|Art. Her early involvement in AIDS activism resulted in the iconic 1989 political art advertising campaign by Gran Fury: “Kissing Doesn’t Kill, Greed and Indifference Do.” Simultaneously with her activism, she began using photography to challenge stereotypes and offer new ways of seeing that transcend and interrogate gender, sexual, and racial norms. Flash now works primarily in portraiture with a 4’x5’ film camera, engaging those who are often deemed invisible. Flash has work included in important public collections such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Brooklyn Museum. Pen + Brush Gallery’s inaugural exhibition in 2018 featured a 30-year retrospective of her significant photographs. Learn more about her work here.

Kei Williams
Secretary

Kei Williams (they/them) is a BLACK queer transmasculine visual artist and community organizer. Born and raised in Upstate New York and a founding member of the Black Lives Matter Global Network, they have helped build some of the most powerful movements of our time. As a part of Movement Netlab, a practice-centered ‘think-make-and-do tank’, they worked to develop conceptual and practical tools based on decentralization as a framework for organizers, activists, and researchers in order to bring us closer to a society of beloved community. A lifelong responder to injustice (the grandchild of labor activists), Kei is an abolitionist organizer whose work has spanned across issues such as racial and gender violence to mass incarceration and jail building to climate jobs and justice with their aim being to transform culture from the individual into a global systemic analysis of structural oppression through the lens of intersectionality. They serve as a curator, designer, and walking tour guide with Black Gotham Experience, a storytelling project documenting the impact of the African Diaspora on New York City. Kei currently lives in Queens, NY with his dog Spartacus and 12 inherited plants.

Bee Davis
Treasurer

From a young age, Bee Davis (she/her) was destined for extraordinary achievements. Tested for a staggering IQ of 191 as a child, she skipped two grades and self-taught herself programming languages like BASIC and PASCAL. By deconstructing an Apple IIc and a Commodore 64, 12-year-old Bee ignited a lifelong passion for technology. Concurrently, her artistic talents blossomed as she learned to sew and oil paint, even launching her own clothing brand by the age of 14. This dual love for technology and art set the stage for Bee's groundbreaking career. Starting at E*TRADE in Menlo Park, she swiftly rose through the ranks of the tech industry, leading the teams that built the HBO and MBUSA websites before moving on to become one of the pioneering engineers at Pandora Music. There, she used machine learning to create Pandora's first profitable ad platform. Her career trajectory then skyrocketed into intelligence work, developing crucial applications for Naval Intelligence, Army Intelligence, DISA, and the NSA's Archangel Project. Following that, Bee took on the monumental task of architecting NASA's cloud infrastructure across its campuses, including Kennedy, Johnson, and Ames Research Centers. After earning a Master's degree in Cybersecurity from Brown University, Bee held pivotal roles at emerging cybersecurity startups like LiftEd, Eaze, Aetion, and Spruce.

However, her life took a turn when she transitioned. As a black trans woman, she found herself pushed out of her cybersecurity roles. Undeterred, Bee refocused her unparalleled skillset on healthcare and data equity for trans and marginalized communities. At Humana, she authored a landmark 30-page document setting the standards for the ethical treatment and analysis of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) and race/ethnicity data. Her work garnered her the Apex Award and the Center of Excellence Award from Humana. In the art world, Bee is just as transformative. She pioneered "The Acrylic Underground," a live painting practice featuring collaborations with musicians and storytellers.

She also founded the Lux Quaubas Modern Art Gallery and owns Beeline Studio in Sacramento, a haven focused on the BIPOC queer community's physical and mental well-being. With a life story as unique and impactful as hers, Bee Davis is not just a trailblazer but a beacon of inspiration. Her journey serves as an indelible example of how talent, resilience, and a commitment to social justice can pave the way for meaningful change.

Ira Sachs
Founding Director

Ira Sachs (he/him) is a filmmaker whose work includes the features Passages, Love is Strange, Little Men (Grand Prize, Deauville Film Festival, 2016), Keep the Lights On (Teddy Award, Berlinale, 2012), and Forty Shades of Blue (Dramatic Grand Jury Prize, Sundance, 2005). Recipient of a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as residency fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, Sachs’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum. In 2009, in recognition of the impact of the AIDS epidemic on generational mentorship for queer artists, and compelled by an urgent need to address the lack of institutional and economic support for queer creative work in all disciplines, Sachs began to imagine and strategize for the initial programs that would become Queer|Art. In 2009, with filmmaker and co-curator Adam Baran, he inaugurated the now long-running monthly screening series Queer|Art|Film, and in 2011, he and arts organizer Lily Bins launched the first year of Queer|Art|Mentorship. As Executive Director of Queer|Art from its inception until 2019, Sachs worked closely with then Programs Coordinator Vanessa Haroutunian to secure non-profit status for the organization, to spearhead partnerships with the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, Visual AIDS, the IFC Center, and HBO, and to organize and develop the donor support necessary for Queer|Art’s long-term growth and sustainability.

Nelson Santos

Nelson Santos (he/him) has over 20 years of experience in the arts, advocacy, and non-profit sector —leading the vision of non-profit art organizations with an LGBTQ+ and social justice mission. He has worked with artists, activists, curators, and community partners to produce and present exhibitions, public programs, visual art projects, and publications that embrace the rich and diverse cultural histories that are often under-recognized and underrepresented. Santos is a faculty member and Academic Advisor of the MFA Fine Art department at the School of Visual Arts. He previously served as the Interim Director of Curatorial Programs at the Leslie-Lohman Museum (2019-2020), responsible for the successful execution of the organization’s exhibitions and collection management; and Director Emeriti of Visual AIDS (2000-2017); a QAM Mentor in Curatorial Practice (2018-2019); Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR) Board Member (2018-2020) and current Queer|Art Board President. Santos is also an artist who lives and works in Brooklyn. Learn more at www.nelsonsantosart.com.

Chris Quach

Chris Quach (he/him) is a Senior Associate Director and the Director of International Recruitment in Undergraduate Admissions at Columbia University. Chris works collaboratively with prospective students and their families to provide key information about the admissions process at Columbia; forges strong relationships rooted in student support with vital University partners in the enrollment process; and oversees international recruitment strategies for Columbia's undergraduate student body. As an admissions professional devoted to college access, Chris previously worked in admissions and recruitment at A Better Chance, a US-based organization supporting underrepresented students in navigating the independent school admissions process.

Chris began his career in local arts grantmaking for the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County in the Washington, DC region. In this role, he supported grantmaking efforts that totalled $5 million distributed annually to over 100 arts and humanities organizations and over 50 individual artists and scholars in Montgomery County, MD. His arts administration experience continues to inform his passion for contributing to a nurturing ecosystem for artists at all stages of their careers. A longtime singer and participant in the LGBTQ choral movement, Chris currently sings with the Empire City Men's Chorus, a NYC-based gay men's chorus. Chris holds an MA in Higher and Postsecondary Education from Teachers College, Columbia University and a BA in Sociology and LGBT Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Ellen Marks

Ellen Marks (she/her) is a retired managing director from Accenture, a leading global professional services company, providing a broad range of services and solutions in strategy, consulting, digital, technology and operations.  Her 24 year career with the company focused on marketing and communications where she worked globally across several industries and business lines. Her skills and experience include developing marketing and communications strategies for acquisitions; brand positioning; events; internal communications; corporate messaging; recruitment; sales campaigns; senior stakeholder management and thought leadership.  During her early career, Ellen was the Director of Marketing and Communications at the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University; she also spent four years at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in various marketing and curatorial roles. Ellen has a Master’s degree in Integrated Marketing Communications from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and a Bachelor’s degree in Art History from Smith College.

Lucila Moctezuma

Lucila Moctezuma (she/her) is a consultant to documentary filmmakers and media organizations in the US and internationally, and programmer with international festivals. Her work with filmmakers focuses on story and creative authorship, and she consults with media organizations on program design, implementation, and as facilitator of story workshops. Currently she is Senior Consultant of Artist Programs at Points North Institute where she co-leads the Diane Weyermann Fellowship, International Programmer for Hot Docs in Canada, and a member of the documentary programming committee at the Morelia International Film Festival in Mexico.

Previously, she held senior positions at Chicken & Egg Pictures, UnionDocs, Women Make Movies, the Media Arts Fellowships for The Rockefeller Foundation, and founded the TFI Latin America Fund for Tribeca Film Institute. She is a member of the Board for Artshack, a non-profit ceramics studio in Brooklyn; member of the Executive Board of Cine Qua Non Lab, a residency for international fiction filmmakers in Michoacán, Mexico; and was Vice-President of the Board of Trustees of The Flaherty.

She is Producer of the feature-length documentary She Wrestles (by award-winning director Charles Fairbanks). Her work as Associate Producer has included the documentary series The New Americans for Kartemquin Films. Lucila is based in Brooklyn, NY, and is originally from Mexico City. She is a 2019 JustFilms Ford Foundation / Rockwood Leadership Institute Fellow and a member of the Documentary Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences since 2021.

Max Rifkind-Barron

Max (he/him) is a queer, Jewish filmmaker from Los Angeles. He wrote and produced the short film "Pipe Dream,” an unconventional coming-of-age story, which was acquired by Warner Brothers Television and is in development as a digital series. He produced Madeleine Olnek’s "Wild Nights with Emily," a feature-length comedy about Emily Dickinson, starring SNL veteran Molly Shannon. It premiered at SXSW and was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award. He has worked at Bazelevs Company, producers of “Unfriended” and “Searching” and at the Sundance Institute as a film screener. He holds an MFA and BA in Film from Columbia University.

Fran Tirado

Fran Tirado (she/her) is a writer, podcaster, and filmmaker in Brooklyn. After leading editorial strategy for magazines like Out and Hello Mr., and ad agencies like Chandelier Creative, most recently Fran was at Netflix managing LGBTQ+ audience engagement strategy and creating shows like “I Like to Watch.” She’s also created and hosted four queer podcasts, currently Like a Virgin with Rose Dommu. Fran has been working in queer media for almost thirteen years. As an organizer, Fran’s work has won her the Stonewall Vision Award, Brooklyn’s 30 Under 30, and MTV’s inaugural Logo Legends honor. She’s spoken at institutions like Yale, Juilliard, Harvard, Northwestern, and NYU and worked with brands like Google, HBO, Instagram, and Nike. Fran’s work has been featured on Vogue, The Washington Post, USA Today, People, TIME, NBC, BBC, PBS, NPR, Newsweek, New York Magazine, Buzzfeed, W, Interview, Elle, The Cut, Glamour, InStyle, Refinery29, GQ, Vox, Vulture, VICE, AV Club, The Rachel Maddow Show, Adweek, Good Morning America, and New York Magazine’s Encyclopedia of New York. The New York Times called Fran a "Queer Champion."

Miranda Haymon

Miranda Haymon (they/she) is a Princess Grace Award-winning director and writer. As a theater director, Miranda has developed and staged work with The Tank, NYTW, Roundabout, Ars Nova, Manhattan Theatre Club, The Public, Bushwick Starr, Signature Theater and more. Miranda has served as Visiting Faculty at Fordham, Dartmouth, Sarah Lawrence, Wesleyan, Rutgers and Harvard. Past fellowships/residencies include New Georges, Space on Ryder Farm, LCT Director’s Lab, Wingspace, NYTW 2050, Roundabout, Manhattan Theatre Club and Arena Stage.. Their film Sis (2023) screened internationally, winning The Emerging Black LGBTQ+ Filmmaker Award at NewFest; it screened most recently at the Whitney Biennial 2024.  As a writer, Miranda most recently wrote Dylan Mulvaney’s Day 365 of Girlhood Live! at the Rainbow Room. Miranda’s commercial directing includes projects with e.l.f. Cosmetics, Progressive, Gucci, GARAGE Magazine, Dunkin’, and Spectrum. Miranda is a graduate of Wesleyan University where they double majored in German Studies and Theater.

Cecilia Gentili

Cecilia Gentili is an advocate, organizer, and storyteller working at the intersections of sex work, immigrant rights, incarceration issues, and trans liberation. Originally from Argentina, Cecilia came to the United States and survived for 10 years as an undocumented immigrant, gaining a living through sex work. She has years of experience working in direct services with organizations like The LGBT Center and Apicha Community Health Center, which led to her moving into policy work, becoming the Director of Policy at GMHC before creating Trans Equity Consulting to advocate directly for better policy for trans people at the local, state, and federal level. Cecilia is a founding member of Decrim NY, a coalition working towards the decriminalization, decarceration, and destigmatization of people in the sex trade. Cecilia has also performed in the hit FX Show Pose, in her one-woman show The Knife Cuts Both Ways, and in countless storytelling events across the country.

Read more about Cecilia’s legacy here.