Name of Contribution: Organizer

Ayana Jamieson, PhD is an educator, mythologist, and depth psychologist. She is a co-organizer for Seeding Futures Now! She is also the founder and creative director of the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network, established in 2011.

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Dr. Jamieson is the advising curator for the New Children’s Museums Octavia E. Butler: Seeding Futures. She also is a contributor to Hyandai Motor’s Artlab Editorial presents, American Artist: Earthseed (2024) and co-shaper of the Monophobic Response for PST+ART,. She has contributed to the Black Futures Anthology, American Artist: Shaper of God, Sierra Club Magazine,  The Feminist Wire, Belonging Identity, Language Diversity, New Global Politics, Public Booksand elsewhere. She is also a member of the Speculative Environmental Futures Collective at UCSD. She is assistant professor of ethnic studies and faculty fellow of The Democracy Institute at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.   

Name of Contribution:  Organizer

Moya Bailey is a Professor at Northwestern University and is the founder of the Digital Apothecary and co-founder of the Black Feminist Health Science Studies Collective. She is the digital alchemist for the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network and the Board President of Allied Media Projects, a Detroit-based movement media organization that supports an ever-growing network of activists and organizers.

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She is a co-author of #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice (MIT Press, 2020) and is the author of Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (New York University Press, 2021). She is an award winning documentarian after completing the short documentary You Just Watch & See(2025) featuring her late Cousin Dollie, and is completing a docuseries Misogynoir in Medicine.

Name of Contribution: Organizer

Shelley Streeby is professor of ethnic studies and literature at the University of California, San Diego. She is also a founder of the Speculative Environmental Futures Collective and a Co-Organizer of the Seeding Futures Now! conference. Her most recent book is Science Fiction Ecologies: World-Making with Butler, Le Guin, and Merril. 

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Other books include Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-Making through Science Fiction and Activism;Radical Sensations: World Movements, Violence, and Visual Culture; American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture; Empire and the Literature of Sensation: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction; and Keywords for Comics Studies. From 2011-2021 she directed the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. She has received three Huntington fellowships—two to work with writer Octavia E. Butler’s papers and one to work on American Sensations; the 2019–2020 Ursula K. Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship at the University of Oregon; and a 2021 American Council of Learned Societies Faculty Fellowship. She also received the 2023 Thomas D. Clareson Award for Distinguished Service from the Science Fiction Research Association.  

Name of Contribution: Inundation: A Graphic Novel on Adaptation, Regeneration & Abolition - A Visionary Fiction Practice

Allen Lebulu Maa (b. 1979) is a multidisciplinary artist, mainly working in fiction and visual art. VONA Alumnist and exhibiting his painting and installation work in galleries in North America and the Global South.

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Exploring the potential of Abolition Ecology and utilizing the genre superlative container of the graphic novel - in recent work he imagines Black and Queer Futures where racial capitalism exhausts itself and new life grows on the Planet again. Interdependent, violence free, thermodynamically regenerative, abundant and convivial.

Name of Contribution: Facilitator 

Whitney Peoples is an anti-racist feminist scholar, facilitator, and consultant. She brings over 20 years of experience in feminist and critical race research, activism, and teaching to her work as the inaugural Director of Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion and the University of Michigan School of Public Health.

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She holds a PhD in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Emory University, an MA in Women’s Studies from the University of Cincinnati, and a BA from Agnes Scott College. She has spoken and written on the intersections of race, gender, health, and popular culture and, more recently, on anti-racist organizational change. Dr. Peoples has deep roots in reproductive justice and black feminist health movements and has had the honor of working and serving with organizations such the Texas Equal Access (TEA) fund; Take Root: Red State Perspectives on Reproductive Justice; The National Women’s Studies Association; Birth Center Equity; 500 Women Scientists and many more. She is a co-founder of the Black Feminist Health Science Studies Collective and co-editor of the book Radical Reproductive Justice: Foundations|Theory|Practice|Critique.

Name of Contribution: Find Your Way Back: Mapping the Emotional Archive Workshop

Asha Grant (she/her) is a keeper and space maker for the stories of Black women, femmes, and gender expansive folks across time and space. A native Angeleno, her people have strong roots in Philadelphia, New Jersey, Detroit, and Alabama. Her practice works with and for the Black Archive.

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Asha is a proud graduate of Spelman College, holds a master’s degree in English from Columbia University. She previously founded The Salt Eaters Bookshop, a bookstore and sanctuary space in Inglewood for Black women and queer people, and is currently earning her Master of Library Science at North Carolina Central University with a focus on Archives and Records Management.

Name of Contribution: Thinking With Heat: Black Explosivity, Material Transformation, and Measurements Toward the Otherwise

Angel Shanel Edwards utilizes the creative modalities of movement, poetics, braiding, textiles, filmmaking, and photography to witness and re/member blackness as it moves through daily life, love, intimacy, and transitions [*gendered and otherwise]. Angel studies across disciplines to explore the complexity and connectedness of liveness.

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Angel has collaborated with Makini, Jonathan Gonzalez, Marguerite Hemmings, Black Quantum Futurism, Yolanda Wisher, Arielle Julia Brown, Pamela Hooks, and Maria Bauman through choreographic, performance, and visual mediums.

Name of Contribution: I can speak about our work building an afro-futurist community center, The Black Schoolhouse, and/or facilitating TBS Process Deck workshop.

Joseph Cuillier (b. 1988, New Orleans, LA) is an artist, designer, educator, and social entrepreneur deeply dedicated to art and design’s capacity to connect individuals, communities, and causes. He uses art and design to create spaces for historical and political education and community building.

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Cuillier’s work has been supported, exhibited, and/or presented by institutions, including the MoMA, Studio Museum, New Museum, Columbia University, Ford Foundation, and Mellon Foundation. He is the co-founder of The Black School and Black Love Fest New Orleans.

Name of Contribution: Graphic Design and “Artistic Practice as Radical Political Imagination Rehearsal”

Manuel Carrión Lira (he/él). PhD Candidate in Literature, Cultural Studies track and Critical Gender Studies specialization at the University of California San Diego.

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Manuel is an Edward Alexander Bouchet Graduate Honor Society member. Manuel holds a M.A. in Latin American Art, Thought and Culture from the Instituto de Estudios Avanzados at Universidad de Santiago de Chile, and a B.A. in Design at Universidad de Valparaíso. Founder of the artistic and political collective Comunidad Catrileo+Carrión, and co-founder of the Centro Cultural Antü Newen in 2019, Chile. 

Name of Contribution: Out of Focus

India is a visual artist and filmmaker whose work reimagines how we see and feel. Her practice challenges dominant narratives, crafting serene visual landscapes and capturing tender moments of connection. Rooted in liberation, her work confronts erasure and centers Black queer life as essential to our collective imagination.

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She was a documentary fellow with Sisters in Cinema from 2023 to 2025. Her docuseries, Out of Focus, premiered in Chicago in 2024 and has since traveled across the United States and internationally, including the Resistance and Joy Screening Tour supported by Color Congress. She has also participated in fellowships and residencies with the University of Chicago and the Chicago Artists Coalition.

Name of Contribution: Ready for the Marvelous: Freedom Dreaming with Surrealist Poetry Games

Kemi Alabi is a Chicago-based poet and cultural strategist. They spent ten years developing narrative strategies for reproductive justice with Forward Together, becoming the organization's inaugural Cultural Strategy Director and Head of Creativity & Impact.

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They're coeditor of The Echoing Ida Collection (Feminist Press, 2021), an anthology of Black reproductive justice writing, and author of Against Heaven (Graywolf Press, 2022), selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award. The collection was a Kate Tufts Discovery Award finalist, Chicago Review of Books Award winner, and one of New York Public Library’s Best Books of 2022, among other honors. Their work appears in The Nation, The Atlantic, The Guardian, the Grammy-nominated album Difficult Grace and elsewhere. Alabi's latest project, supported by a Feminist-in-Residence fellowship at Northwestern University, explores uterine fibroids and medical neglect among Black trans and queer people. They’re currently the inaugural Beloit Poetry Journal Iron Mouth Curatorial Fellow.

Name of Contribution: Dreams Realized: Artistic Expression, Environmental Consciousness, and Community Practice at The LOVE Building

Mackenzie S. Rector, PhD is a program strategist, educator, and community-centered leader whose work bridges artistic expression, social justice, and collective care. She currently serves as Programs Manager at The LOVE Building in Detroit, where she helps shape programming, partnerships, and community-based experiences that center creativity, accessibility, and neighborhood connection.

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Her work explores how intentional spaces can support both civic imagination and everyday practices of care. Mackenzie holds a PhD in Sport Management from The Ohio State University. She brings a cross-sector background spanning the sport industry, higher education, nonprofit leadership, and community-based programming. Her scholarship takes a critical approach to sport, including examining the ways institutions reproduce inequity while simultaneously positioning themselves as vehicles for social good. Through research, teaching, and practice, she is committed to exploring how institutions, communities, and cultural spaces might be challenged, reimagined, and reshaped toward greater justice and accountability.

Name of Contribution: Speaker for the panel, any design need for the retreat, or any community building facilitation needed

Mithsuca Berry is an artist, educator, and storyteller. Exploring mediums such as design, installation, and writing, each piece marks an epiphany in their journey of healing. They reflect the full spectrum of human emotion as it relates to being a black queer/non-binary person of Caribbean descent.

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Their works respond to the question: How do I create an archive of imagery that records the complex emotions that surface in my lifetime? As stories like theirs are oftentimes erased, the intention is to sketch/write/RELEASE those examples into the world. Art has always been the intersection between their inner child and spiritual self. Their work exists to protect the future autonomy of people like them. They say, “Society has always struggled with believing people like me exist, making my journey of coming into self inherently spiritual. My self love, my healing, my play — is an experience that bends the reality we have been taught to attached to. My hands were made to bring that “mythology” into every visual that I can. The whimsy, the grief, the resilience. Once I have brought that story into the world, there is no denying it exists.That is how we preserve our history, and pass it down to generations after us.“

Name of Contribution: The Future Is Present/The Art of World Building with Octavia E. Butler (Writing Workshop)

Ola Ronke is a interdisciplinary artist who works in collage, papermaking, printmaking and stop motion animation. She is also a writer, cultural strategist and the Creator/Director of The Free Black Women's Library, a social art project that currently features a collection of 5000 books, a period pantry, free store, herb garden, reading club, weekly book swap and a wide array of free public programs. 

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She has received artist fellowships from NYFA, BRIC Arts, Blackburn Printmaking Shop, and the Metropolitan Museum. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Hyperallergic, Teen Vogue, and BUST magazine. She is also a proud mom, union member, plant fiend, and dance machine. Follow her at @thefreeblackwomenslibrary to stay connected.

Name of Contribution: Nikki High

Name of Contribution: Octavia's Queer Protean Animacies

Aimee Bahng is an associate professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at Pomona College, currently chairing both Gender Studies and American Studies.

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Author of the award-winning book Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times(Duke University Press 2018), she has also co-edited the Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies volume (NYU Press 2021) as well as a special issue of Journal of Asian American Studies on "Transpacific Futurities" with Christine Mok. Her other publications include work on theorizing a decolonial transpacific studies, teaching the #BlackLivesMatter movement, and the queer-feminist worldbuilding of Octavia E. Butler and Karen Tei Yamashita. Her current book project, Settler Environmentalism and Pacific Resurgence, engages environmental law’s settler colonial history and points to alternative models of planetary accountability that highlight ongoing Native Pacific environmental movements. She lives and works on the eastern edge of Tovaangar in Claremont, California, where her care community includes pottery, cats, and queers.

Name of Contribution: Writer/Director, We Call Each Other

Sarah Oberholtzer is a filmmaker and producer invested in telling stories that imagine alternative futures that support BIPOC communities.

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With past experience as Story Producer for Respair Production and Media’s experimental doc “1 Million Experiments” and Associate Producer for Essence McDowell’s feature doc “Invisible Giants,” Sarah is currently an Impact Producer for the multi-media project “Fined Out,” which explores the criminalization of poverty. Their current storytelling project, “We Call Each Other,” is a short film series that imagines community beyond prisons and police. The first film in the series, of the same name, is out now thanks to PBS affiliate Black Public Media. Festivals such as the Trans Stellar Film Festival, Imagine This Women’s International Film Fest and The Bush Films have all featured their documentary short “Reimagining Tomorrow.” Their visual poem “Love Letter to Chicago’s Black Womxn,” made in collaboration with the national Black Girl Freedom Fund, screened at the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project (QWOCMAP) in the Bay Area. Sarah received a bachelor’s degree in Radio, Television + Film from Northwestern University in Evanston, IL.

Name of Contribution: "From Cali to Pali:"  Seeding Solidarities and other Feminist Topographies of Relation

Steph Martinez is a writer, poet, teacher, and researcher based in Southern California. They are an interdisciplinary scholar of race, gender, and the environment. Martinez's work engages working-class feminist of color theories and praxis, and speculative futures studies.

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Steph is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Humanities Center and the Center for Liberation, Anti-Racism, and Belonging at UC Irvine, and is working on community-rooted projects that investigate histories of land, race, and Indigeneity in Orange County and beyond.

Name of Contribution: Seeding the Futures We Desire (Workshop)

Yolo Akili Robinson (he/they) is a non-binary, award-winning writer, healing justice practitioner, yogi, and founder and Executive Director of the Black Emotional and Mental Health Collective (BEAM).

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A leading voice in reimagining mental health, Yolo guides BEAM’s national work to fund, resource, and train a network of liberation-centered therapists, healers, and organizations delivering culturally grounded care to under-resourced communities. Under his leadership, BEAM has distributed over $600,000 to grassroots mental health organizations and provided $200,000 in direct cash assistance to more than 800 families. The organization has also trained over 15,000 community members in healing justice and crisis response, strengthening community-based care nationwide. A 2024 Ford Global Fellow, Yolo has been recognized by U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy and is a recipient of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Equity Award. His work has been featured widely in national media and on major stages. He is the author of Dear Universe and a contributor to the New York Times bestselling anthology You Are Your Best Thing, and lives in Los Angeles.

Name of Contribution: Science Fiction Creates the Future at the New Children's Museum

Gabrielle Wyrick is the Chief Curator and Director of Art + Engagement at the New Children’s Museum, overseeing all exhibitions, education, and community engagement initiatives.

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She earned a BA in Art History from the University of California San Diego and an MA in Art History from Tufts University. Prior to her time at the New Children’s Museum, Wyrick was the Deputy Director of Learning and Engagement at the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Associate Director of Education at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and the Education Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Gabrielle has led workshops, lectures, panels, and training sessions at institutions internationally ranging from MASS MoCA, The High Museum of Art in Atlanta, The Portland Art Museum in Maine, The Contemporary Austin, The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Oslo, Norway. Most recently she was the co-Curator of the exhibition Octavia E. Butler: Seeding Futures, and the Project Director for the Science Fiction Creates the Future initiative at the New Children’s Museum. She is driven by the ways in which art and museums have the potential to impact individuals and communities in powerful, transformative ways.

Name of Contribution: Queer Fan Fiction and the Politics of Fantasy

Alexis Lothian is Associate Professor in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of Maryland College Park. Her research centers on speculative fiction, digital media, and fan culture and their relationships to gender, race, and disability justice.

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She is the author of Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility (NYU Press, 2018) and is co-editor of the Queer/Trans/Digital/Diaspora book series with NYU Press. Her scholarship has appeared in American Quarterly, Feminist Studies, Utopian Studies, Transformative Works and Cultures, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Cinema Journal, and Camera Obscura, among other venues. She was a founding member of the editorial team of the open access fan studies journal Transformative Works and Cultures and served from 2012-2022 as first member and then chair of the Otherwise Award Motherboard. Alexis is currently completing a book on the politics of fantasy in slash fan fiction with coauthor Kristina Busse; her next book project focuses on the history of social justice discourse in online fan culture.

Name of Contribution: Therapeutic Imagining: Restorative Fabulation in Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory

Cassandra L. Jones is an assistant professor of Africana Studies and affiliate faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies and Film and Media Studies at the University of Cincinnati. She is the author of Black Speculative Feminisms: Memory and Liberated Futures in Black Women’s Fiction (The OSU Press, New Suns Series, 2024).

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Her work explores how Black women writing sci-fi/fantasy as movement intellectuals offer us lessons about how to recognize, celebrate, preserve, and re-evaluate Black history and culture. Using speculative fiction, they rethink memory and move from authors we might take as representative of theoretical models for understanding Black lives to theorists themselves imagining liberated worlds.

Name of Contribution: Octavia E. Butler: Seeding Futures exhibit talk and tour (alongside Dr. Ayana Jamieson + Gabrielle Wyrick as we all co-curated the exhibit together).

Iyari Arteaga, whose name means corazón in Wixárika (Huichol), is an Indigenous Mexican and Puerto Rican poet who writes from a place of deep relationship with ancestors, the Earth, and the teachings housed within our own bodies. She views poetry as a powerful modality of liberation—an embodied practice that allows us to recall, heal, and blur the boundaries of time.

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Rooted in theater and poetry, Iyari has performed nationwide with Teatro Izcalli, self-published The Incantation of My Hands (2023), and earned an MA in Museum Studies from the University of San Francisco. In addition to her work as an artist and community member, she has over a decade of experience in the nonprofit sector, where she has organized and led community programs and co-curated Octavia E. Butler: Seeding Futures (2024) and Emboldened, Embodied (2020).

Name of Contribution: Social Justice, Anti-Racism, and Equity in Early Childhood Education 

Michelle DeJohnette, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Early Childhood Studies at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and the Inaugural Director of the CEIS Afrofuturism Initiative.

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Drawing on her experiences as a former foster youth, first-generation college graduate, and early childhood program owner/director for over 25 years, her work bridges lived experience, scholarship, and practice. Dr. DeJohnette’s research and teaching focus on preparing critically conscious early childhood educators through anti-racist, culturally responsible, and justice-centered frameworks. Her scholarship engages critical theories, anti-Blackness in early childhood education, and equity-focused pedagogy. She is currently leading multiple funded projects, including a faculty training initiative on anti-racist pedagogy and innovative work integrating generative AI into justice-centered early childhood education. Through her research, teaching, and public scholarship, Dr. DeJohnette works to disrupt inequities in early learning and reimagine more just and liberatory educational futures.

Name of Contribution: Videographer & Creative Director 

Jason's artistic career so far has been driven by a love of learning. Pushing the boundaries of what he understands about visual art has been a passion since childhood, but with age has come a new understanding of how that art can support the community of advocates he belongs to.

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His ability to construct a narrative with the tools made available to him is enabled through his love for filmmaking and photography, which he uses to amplify marginalized voices and like-minded organizations who need genuine storytelling. When behind the camera, he has a deft hand at shaping light and finding honesty in his subjects, incorporating his understanding of composition gained through three decades of illustration and design practice. His years spent editing and retouching the work of other photographers gives him an understanding of how to cull the good ideas from the bad ideas, and how to turn a fleeting creative spark into an idea that can be communicated to an audience.

Name of Contribution: Speculative Fiction - A Guide to Researching the Future 

Monique Dixon is a Doctoral candidate in Literature . Her research focuses on speculative fiction, the Black radical tradition, and ecocriticism. She is also a recipient of the Speculative Environmental Futures research starter grant.

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In her dissertation she plans to analyze how Black authors extrapolate from the past and present to speculate about alternative realities and consider how that process is involved in the Black radical tradition. 

Name of Contribution: Access Coordinator

Ruby Hsu is pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in Gender, Ethnicity, and Multicultural Studies with a minor in Psychology at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. She currently serves as a research assistant for Dr. Ayana Jamieson and participates in several academic and leadership initiatives, including Psi Chi, the Emerging Scholars Program, the ENGAGE Summer REU Program, the Kellogg Honors College, and the 2026 Diversity Ambassador Program.

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She presented at the 17th Annual Lowell Overton Undergraduate Research Symposium. Prior to entering academia, Ruby spent more than two decades in the financial industry, including roles at JPMorgan Private Bank, hedge funds across multiple sectors, and leadership positions in investor relations and operations within the blockchain and Web3 space. She plans to pursue a PhD in Ethnic Studies and a career in academia focused on research, teaching, and mentorship.

Name of Contribution: Moderator

Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego, Curtis Marez is the author of Drug Wars: The Political Economy of Narcotics (U of Minnesota Press, 2004), Farm Worker Futurism: Speculative Technologies of Resistance (U of Minnesota Press, 2016), University Babylon: Film and Race Politics on Campus (UC Press, 2019) and Producing Precarity: The Costs of Making TV in Poor Places (NYU Press, 2025).

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Recent essays include: “Farm Worker Culture in Literature and Film, or Tomás Rivera’s Brown Noir;” “TV News and the Origins of Black Studies and Ethnic Studies;” and “Cannaboom: Race and Labor in California Cannabis Cultures.” Along with Lisa Duggan he edits American Studies Now, a UC Pressbook series. Curtis is the former editor of American Quarterly, past president of the American Studies Association, past Chair of the Ethnic Studies Department and Chair of the UC Press Faculty Editorial Board. He’s currently completing a manuscript for UC Press titled The Cheech and Chong Book.  

Name of Contribution: Moderator

Joo Ok Kim earned her Ph.D. in Literature from University of California, San Diego, and her M.A. in English from the University of Illinois, Chicago. Her research and teaching interests include transpacific critique, anticolonial print cultures, speculative environmental literatures and cultures, and US multiethnic literature and culture.

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She is the author of Warring Genealogies: Race, Kinship, and the Korean War (Temple UP, 2022).

Name of Contribution: Moderator

India is an educator, organizer, and racial justice and equity advocate. She is fierce and passionate about creating a socially responsible, anti-racist, and equity-driven world. She has spent a decade working with organizations to strengthen their policies and practices related to race, equity, sexual orientation, and gender.

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India serves as the LGBTQIA+ equity specialist at MiraCosta College; the co-founder of Moxie Consultancy Collective, a queer women of color owned and led global consultancy; as well as the owner of Omi Picnics, a luxury picnic company that takes the classic picnic that we all know and love and kicks it up a notch. A future-oriented, strategic thinker with a powerful voice; India is completing a PhD in Ethnic Studies at UCSD and is excited to serve on the Lambda Archives board.

Name of Contribution: Keynote

Dr. Nicole Rawls (formerly Truesdell) is an Organizational Death Doula, Cultural Strategist, and Storyweaver who guides individuals, organizations, and movements through the transitions, endings, and reinventions that are required to make new futures possible by learning to strategize with their dreams.

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Nicole holds a PhD in Anthropology from Michigan State University, specializing in race, racism, citizenship, and the nation-state. She spent over fifteen years teaching and leading in higher education at Michigan State University, the University of Bristol (UK), Beloit College, and Brown University before leaving academia in 2021 to build something that could not exist inside institutions committed to upholding the colonial project. She is the founder of the Embodied Futures Institute and the creator of Embodied Strategic Dreaming — a praxis-based methodology that integrates structural analysis, cultural context, and embodied intelligence to support collaborative visioning and transformative change. She has advised boards and executive teams, directed multi-million dollar program portfolios, facilitated strategic retreats for organizations ranging from small leadership teams to convenings of 500+, and guided organizations through the full life cycle of programs with a focus on structures, policies, and practices that are genuinely human-centered.