Lisbet Tellefsen (she/her) is an Oakland, California based community archivist, curator, producer, and publisher who has been documenting and creating culture in the Bay Area’s black, queer, and women’s communities for the past 4 decades.

As the publisher/co-founder of Aché: a Black Lesbian Journal, which served as a nexus for black queer organizing in the late 80’s/early 90s, she was an active participant during the renaissance that saw an explosion in black queer cultural production internationally. A prolific event producer, her production credits range from drag king shows to film series’, Sistahs Steppin’ in Pride: the East Bay pride march and festival that ran for 10 years in Oakland, to “Sister Comrade,” an historic tribute honoring two of her personal mentors, poets Audre Lorde and Pat Parker.

Her current work focuses on documenting movement history and preserving community memory. Tellefsen’s extensive archives and collections are used frequently for exhibitions, research, and media projects. As an archival consultant she has worked on numerous film projects including the documentaries Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution and Free Angela and All Political Prisoners. As a curator her most recent exhibitions include “The Black Panther Party: 1966-1982” at the West Oakland Mural Project, “Angela Davis OUTspoken,” and “From Feminists to Feministas” at the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender (GLBT) History Museum in San Francisco.

Her collections have been exhibited internationally, most recently: “Angela Davis: Seize the Time” at the Zimmerli Art Museum (2021-22); “1 Million Roses for Angela Davis” at The Albertinum in Dresden, Germany (2021); “Get with the Action: Political Posters from the 1960s to Present” at SFMOMA (2017-18); and “All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50 and Black Power” at the Oakland Museum of California (2016 and 2019) and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). Over 200 objects from the Tellefsen collection now reside in the permanent collections of SFMOMA, the Oakland Museum of California, and the Smithsonian NMAAHC. An exhibition, “Angela Davis: Seize the Time,” inspired by the Tellefsen Collection and featuring over 200 pieces from her archive, opened at the Zimmerli Art Museum in September 2022 at Rutgers in New Jersey and will be traveling to the Oakland Museum of California in late 2022. The exhibition catalog Angela Davis: Seize the Time was published in 2020 by Hirmer Verlag.

A former board member of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, she is currently an Advisory Board member of The Bay Area Lesbian Archives (BALA) and a personal archivist to several movement luminaries, including musician Esperanza Spalding. In 2012, the Lisbet Tellefsen Papers were acquired by Yale University and are permanently housed at Yale’s Beinecke Library.

Peace And Love El Henson is a black feminist urban ethnographer and critical porn studies analyst whose research and teaching lies at the intersection of Black Studies and Women’s Gender & Sexuality Studies.

She primarily focuses on black queer femmes, state violence, pornography, and ethnography. Peace And Love’s research agenda flows in two streams. The first uses black femmes’ theatrical performances from online interracial pornography to read real-life state policing encounters and vice versa. This research aims to denude the unconscious racialized pornographic BDSM (Bondage and Discipline/Domination and Submission/Sadism and Masochism/Sadomasochism) structured into interracial relations across sites of chattel slavery, professional pornography, public schools, universities, neighborhoods, and beyond. The second stream offers ethnographic case studies on black femmes who use erotic performance as a mode of survival, artistry, and pleasure amid genocide of low-income black neighborhoods in Oakland, CA.

Broadly, both streams of research illuminate how these femmes employ erotic mastery and discipline to navigate, negotiate, and rattle the racialized pornographic economy of antiblack policing, captivity, and ultimate genocide in the United States. These projects are deeply invested in centering the pain, pleasure, and power black queer femmes may find in grappling with this vexed economy, its disciplinary structures, and its symbolic or literal materializations across various settings. Peace And Love received a B.A. in African American Studies and a minor in Education at the University of California, Berkeley. She also earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in African & African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Fun fact: Amidst all the fray, Peace And Love is an intergalactic thinker, writer, and creative who enjoys mastering visual arts, music, poetry and performance.

Since migrating to the Bay Area from Washington, D.C. in 1971, Daphne Muse has been an unflagging caretaker and activist, dedicating herself to the intersections between education, neighborhood organization, public exhibitions and literature.

Shortly after arriving she became the secretary of the Angela Davis Legal Defense Team. During those years, Ms. Muse also advocated for the founding of the African American Studies department at UC Berkeley and later became a teacher at UC Berkeley under Dr. William (Bil) Banks and also taught for several years at Mills College. Ms. Muse saw herself as an ambassador between the university and the lives of the nearby marginalized (then referred to as Third World communities). She often organized large scale public programs and thoughtfully curated exhibitions in order to bring these communities into conversation.

Together with the UC Berkeley African American Studies department she organized events with James Baldwin, Shirley Graham Du Bois, and Gwendolyn Brooks and curated exhibitions related to their respective publications. Ms. Muse was and continues to be professionally and personally close with prominent figures in the Black Feminist movement as it evolved through the UC Berkeley African American Studies department. She worked closely with Dr. Barbara Christian and became a longtime friend of Dr. VèVè Clark and current department chair Dr. Ula Taylor. Over the years. Ms. Muse amassed and preserved an exceptional collection of ephemera, including over 5,000 letters and related materials that intimately document Black life and history.  

Zachary Norris champions and imagines emancipated futures made possible through community care. As the Executive Director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Norris enacts his theories in ways that reduce harm and shift away from (and ultimately replace) police and criminalization.

As the cofounder of Restore Oakland, Norris conceives of a path towards a more just future through a collaboration between the Ella Baker Center and the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, where a new center and restaurant becomes a sight for service industry training, collectivity, justice, and economic hope. Much of Norris’s labor also stems from a deep commitment to the promise of restorative justice as framed by a need for truth and reinvestment. He expounds on these ideas in his recent book, Defund Fear: Safety Without Policing, Prisons, and Punishment.

Born and raised in Oakland, Norris once again lives in the city with his wife and two daughters. He received his Bachelor of Arts from Harvard University followed by a JD from New York University Law School. He also studied at the Labor Community Strategy Center’s National School for Strategic Organizing in Los Angeles, California. In 2011 Norris was a Soros Justice Fellow and in 2015 he received the American Constitution Society’s David Carliner Public Interest Award. In Fall 2020, he lectured for the UC Berkeley Big Ideas program focusing on his work with the Ella Baker Center and the 2020 election.

Sadie Barnette’s multimodal practice engages themes of surveillance, gentrification, queer kinship, community care, and intergenerational activism. With attention to the intersections between the mundane and the fantastical, she often reinterprets archives to explore modes of recuperating and re-presenting Black histories.

Born and raised in Oakland, where she still resides, Barnette’s deep reverence for Black Bay area communities manifests in artwork that examines the harm of a changing landscape caused by gentrification and the promise of reconstituting ways of being together and loving Blackness. Barnette makes use of color, form, and materials–most frequently pink, floral designs, and glitter–to trouble visual expectations and gesture towards speculative possibilities. Barnette holds a BFA from California Institute of the Arts and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego.

She has been awarded grants and residencies by the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Camargo Foundation in France. Her work is in the permanent collections of institutions such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; California African American Museum; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Oakland Museum of California; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Studio Museum in Harlem; Brooklyn Museum; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. She lives and works in Oakland, CA, and is represented by Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles and Jessica Silverman in San Francisco. Her artwork is also featured here, on the Black Studies Collaboratory’s website.

Krudxs Cubensi is an AfroCuban queer feminist Hip Hop duo composed of Odaymar Cuesta and Oli Prendes and committed to Black feminist, queer and vegan politics within the Caribbean and beyond.

Central to their mission is the belief that music is medicine for the people and for themselves. Both musicians have extensive formal training – Odaymar Cuesta studied Fine Arts at the Higher Pedagogical Institute in Havana and Oli Prendes at the National School of Music and the Higher Institute of Art in Havana Cuba. They have produced eight independent albums, produced, directed and starred in music and art videos, self-organized several US and international tours, and collaborated with more than three hundred artists and activists on projects around the world. 

Although now residing in the United States, Cuesta and Prendes continue to centralize the experiences of their communities in Cuba including speaking out against authoritarianism. Since their world debut at the International Hip Hop Festival of Alamar in 1998, they have remained connected to Hip Hop communities and political struggles across the world. 

Peace And Love El Henson is a black feminist urban ethnographer and critical porn studies analyst whose research and teaching lies at the intersection of Black Studies and Women’s Gender & Sexuality Studies.

She primarily focuses on black queer femmes, state violence, pornography, and ethnography. Peace And Love’s research agenda flows in two streams. The first uses black femmes’ theatrical performances from online interracial pornography to read real-life state policing encounters and vice versa. This research aims to denude the unconscious racialized pornographic BDSM (Bondage and Discipline/Domination and Submission/Sadism and Masochism/Sadomasochism) structured into interracial relations across sites of chattel slavery, professional pornography, public schools, universities, neighborhoods, and beyond. The second stream offers ethnographic case studies on black femmes who use erotic performance as a mode of survival, artistry, and pleasure amid genocide of low-income black neighborhoods in Oakland, CA.

Broadly, both streams of research illuminate how these femmes employ erotic mastery and discipline to navigate, negotiate, and rattle the racialized pornographic economy of antiblack policing, captivity, and ultimate genocide in the United States. These projects are deeply invested in centering the pain, pleasure and power black queer femmes may find in grappling with this vexed economy, its disciplinary structures, and its symbolic or literal materializations across various settings. Peace And Love received a B.A. in African American Studies and a minor in Education at the University of California, Berkeley. She also earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in African & African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Fun fact: Amidst all the fray, Peace And Love is an intergalactic thinker, writer, and creative who enjoys mastering visual arts, music, poetry and performance.