2025 Emerge Fellowship Culminating Symposium

Allie (she/her) is a Montréal (Tiohtià:ke) based activist, public speaker and educator, writer, content creator, organizer, artist, and sociology and sexuality studies graduate, using her platforms to shed light on issues close to her heart, becoming a growing and sought after voice within the Canadian disabled community on topics including MAID and accessibility. She is currently doing her Masters degree at McGill University, researching racialized masculinities in alt-right masculinist movements.

Alysse Swann (they/them) is a Master's student in Animal Studies at NYU, passionate about the intersections of disability, animal advocacy, art, and social change. Their work explores how neurodiversity shapes human-animal relationships, drawing from lived experience and interdisciplinary research. Alysse has a background in animal welfare and media, using storytelling to inspire activism. Beyond their studies, Alysse enjoys astrology, playing with their cats, going to concerts, and spending time with their sisters.

Genevieve Ramos is a Chicago-based painter, disability justice advocate, and cultural worker. Her art blends pop culture aesthetics, feminist thought, and an intersectional lens, using vibrant colors to explore disability narratives, culture, and resistance. She organizes with Cambiando Vidas to challenge systemic violence at the intersection of disability and migration. Genevieve will be developing Crip Paint Power, a portrait series highlighting disabled leadership and the role of intersectional perspectives in justice movements.

Jen Ham (she/hers) is a blind-deaf Korean-American, abolitionist care theorist, mutual aid organizer, Marxist-Leninist,  PhD candidate in the History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, and executive director of Crip Curl Adaptive Surf. Jen cohabitates with her guide dog, Verna, and sourdough starter, Shallan, and is always on the hunt for a new fantasy read, vegan recipe, adventure sport, and texture. Her dissertation is focused on the political economy of disability and the social domination of health. She hopes to use social theory and a critical disability lens to better understand the material basis of our capitalist condition and strategize class struggle around our entangled disablements. Beneath her hammer and sickle exterior, Jen is a messy assemblage of crip feelings and affective un-doings. Teasing out her complicated relationship to intimacy as a newly totally blind woman who is becoming deaf and lives with the constancy of skeletal pain, her Emerge project is a blind-deaf guide to love, sex, and rebellion.

OBSIDIENNE OBSURD is a proudly mad, mind-bending, genre-melting, surrealist, maximalist, pseudo-intellectual bespoke garbage-wearing drag goblin multi-hyphenate. Hailed for her bold silhouettes, absurdist performance proclivity, and iconically recognizable paint, OBSIDIENNE is a prolific drag producer, outlandishly ambitious performer, and classical violist. OBSIDIENNE is currently an artist-in-residence at 200 Channels, an experimental performance art venue in South-of-Market in San Francisco. They also bring gay chaos to the high desert of Joshua Tree, where she curates a niche pop-culture drag show called HORSE GIRL. In December 2025, OBSIDIENNE will present a full-length, autobiographical drag and contemporary classical music, staged production with generous support from the Gerbode Foundation. They attribute their ability to harness chaos to cultivating an aligned, harmonious relationship with their mental illnesses—a practice which has earnestly morphed into a tool of their trade.

peace Waters is a Brooklyn-raised interdisciplinary artist and scholar grounded in a Black theater tradition that explores the roles of witness and testimony in collective and intergenerational healing. Their current modalities of focus weave film, collage, movement, and poetry. Currently in deep study with Black crip oracles through space and time, they can often be found with a book in one hand and their multicolored pen in the other.

Stardust Pine-jorah (he/ze) is a swirling mist of poetry, the dust of transcestors, disabled kinship, Jewish earth magic, survivors, queer shapeshifters, freedom fighters, truth seekers.  Ze is a fluid agender, white queer trans and multiply disabled poet, energy practitioner, land tender, advocate, tree, ecosystem. We are a fluid communicator and express ourself through writing, art, AAC. 

Stardust is a counter colonial energetic space holder, through his project Ffluidtree, offering writing, art, rituals, energetic and somatic containers to disabled, neurodivergent, trans and queer kin. Stardust is passionate about supporting kin in (re) connection to the earth and themselves as one, rooting In disability justice, eco-sensual knowing, pleasure, play, truth, transformation. In his project Stardust explores communication and embodying our freest voice as a pathway to collective liberation, as part of a bigger offering of poetry, energetic practices, personal story. 

You can connect with and find more about Stardust’s work at his website.

Tiezst “Tie” Taylor (they/them) is a Disabled Black femme who is non-binary trans. They are a radical educator, artist-activist, poet, and storyteller. They have earned degrees in education (B.A. in the individualized major of Teaching for Social Justice, New York University & M.S.Ed in Elementary Education, University of Pennsylvania), and are a proponent of disability justice and abolitionist frameworks. Their work explores their experiences in surviving: Disability and severe mental illness; intergenerational trauma and poverty; and intersecting forms of oppression in the U.S. They use their art and research to educate, heal, nurture, radicalize, and catalyze change for all marginalized peoples. Tiezst was a Spring 2024 Brooklyn Poets Fellow and a past awardee of the NYSCA/NYFA Artists with Disabilities Grant. Tie’s work has appeared in Water Damaged Paper Anthology, Vol. 3. Through Community We Reimagine and the Wildflower issue of Lucky Jefferson.

Titania Buchholdt is a cultural worker and cultural historian specializing in traditional indigenous music of the Philippines, with a focus on the music and culture of central Mindanao. She teaches traditional kulintang ensemble music of the southern Philippines and has presented music workshops nationally and internationally. She facilitates online sessions as well as a wide range of in-person experiences with master musicians based in Mindanao. Through the EMERGE Fellowship, she is creating disability access to this complex cultural heritage.

Jade T. Perry, M.Ed. (she/they) is a BlackQueerDisabled femme, writer, educator, interdisciplinary artist, and mystic. JTP is the Co-Founder of the Chicago Hoodoo Society and serves on the board of Parallel Play, a COVID-conscious community arts and care organization. With a background in the higher education industry, JTP now creates transformative virtual & in-person spaces that affirm the wisdom, needs, and thriving of Disabled, chronically ill, Black, Brown, and LGBTQIA+ communities. From 2017–2023, JTP was the Co-Founder and Co-Director of The Mystic Soul Project, a nonprofit centering Black and Brown, Queer and Trans spiritual leaders, activists, and healers. Her writing appears in multiple anthologies and platforms, including Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care, and Desire, edited by Alice Wong. JTP's writing engages themes of spirituality, spiritual activism, disability justice, and political education. Finally, she has built a thriving online community as a creator on Patreon.com. Learn more at jadetperry.com

Jade will be presenting their keynote speech: "Tend Fire, Pour Water, Believe Earth, Bless Bone: Disability Justice and Black Helping & Healing Traditions" during the 2025 Emerge Fellowship Culminating Symposium on Zoom.