Cara Page is a Black Queer Feminist cultural/memory worker, curator, and organizer. For the past 30+ years, she has organized with Black, Indigenous and People of Color, Queer/Trans/Lesbian/Gay/Bi/Intersex/Gender Non-Conforming liberation movements in the US & Global South at the intersections of racial, gender & economic justice, reproductive justice, healing justice and transformative justice. She is leading a new project, Changing Frequencies, a Black Queer Feminist led, abolitionist organizing project that designs cultural memory work to disrupt the harms & experimentation of the Medical Industrial Complex. She is also co-founder of the Healing Histories Project, Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective and former Executive Director of the Audre Lorde Project. She is co-author and editor of Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care & Safety. You can find her at carapage.co and on IG: @changingfrequencies
Susan Raffo (she/her) is a writer, cultural worker and bodyworker living in Mnisota Makoce, in the city of Minneapolis. Her interest is in looking at all of the layers of resourcing needed to support community and movements, from support for individual and collective bodies shaped by generational trauma and supremacy to support for infrastructures that are grounded in dignity, care and generational vision. In addition to the Healing Histories Project, Raffo is a core group member of REP, a Black-led network showing up to support others in moments of crisis or urgency, with care and respect for the full dignity and autonomy of those in crisis. Raffo is the author of Queerly Classed (1997), Restricted Access (1999), and Liberated to the Bone (AK Press: 2022). You can find her at www.susanraffo.com.
Luce Capco Lincoln (he/they/siya) is currently located on lenapehoking, and brings many years of experience as a cultural worker, filmmaker, political educator and media nerd to Healing Histories Project. Most recently, Luce spent 8 years at Global Action Project working to create social justice films and popular education curriculum to uplift and organize trans, non-binary, queer, immigrant youth and young adults. When not thinking about timelines as a movement tool, Luce collaborates with BIPOC artists to create work that highlights intersectional solidarity, community resilience and a liberated future for all. Luce is co-founding member of Shadow Work Media and loves to make experimental films.
Rachel Cotterman (they/them) works at the intersection of healing arts, popular education, memory work, and collective liberation. They have been honored to participate in a range of transformative collaborations over the years, including organizing convenings at The Stone House, a former social change retreat and training center in central NC, providing facilitation for groups of white folks confronting internalized racism and moving into solidarity work, and supporting LGBTQ+ youth as the coordinator of the Queer Resource Center at Warren Wilson College. Rachel has an MA in Social and Cultural Geography from UNC-CH, where they coordinated an oral history project about rural roads and racial segregation for the Southern Oral History Program. They support people in their community with a range of politicized somatic healing modalities, and are completing study as a practitioner of a holistic health system, Polarity Therapy.
Tanvi Avasthi (she/her/hers) is a Certified Nurse Midwife, WHNP, and anti-racism organizer with EqualHealth’s Campaign Against Racism. She has worked as a community health nurse, emergency department nurse, and nurse educator prior to working in reproductive health. The throughline of her work has been providing a space for radical empathy and transparency to demystify power and work in companionship with those she works with: patients, student nurses, and fellow activists. She maintains a mighty tropical plant empire and would like to one day go back to beekeeping and teaching yoga.
tae min suh (they/them) currently resides on Lenapehoking territory and is deeply interested in building out their practices of care, safety, and healing with their loved ones. they teach martial arts and self-defense to queer/trans folks; play pungmul – a drumming practice indigenous to Corea; are exploring herbal medicine and other forms of body work; and organize with community groups rooted in anti-violence, abolition, healing justice, queer/trans liberation and advocacy, and more.
Sharon Lehil (she/her/hers) is a registered nurse. She earned her MSN from The Johns Hopkins University. She works at the bedside in a Medical ICU and at a school of nursing as a clinical instructor for public health. Prior to nursing, she was a research assistant, a mental health worker at a residential crisis center, a resource navigator at a day shelter for the unhoused, and a farmer with WWOOF. She completed a term of service with AmeriCorps NCCC where she worked on projects focused on: education, urban and rural development, and environmental stewardship. Outside of her work, she is committed to supporting and mentoring youth to help close the achievement gap. As the daughter of immigrants, she is passionate about working with underserved and underrepresented communities.
Sangi Ravichandran (she/they) is a queer crip femme Desi immigrant artist, scholar, healer, grower and seed enthusiast. Their life’s work is geared towards building a world free from punishment and violence. She is a prison abolitionist and organizes with Love & Protect, a volunteer led collective, supporting women and gender non-conforming/non-binary people of color who are criminalized or harmed by state and interpersonal violence. She is a part of the Rogers park seed library, where she imagines and works towards liberation for all, through seed keeping practices. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois, researching the intersections of criminalization, law and science and also teaches in the Sociology, Criminology, Law and Justice and Black studies departments. Through her art, growing, research, teaching and organizing practices, she hopes to collectively build a world that is geared towards gender and racial justice.
Lilliann M. Paine (she/her), MPH, is a Public Health Strategist with 10 years of experience leading and building impactful community change. She has a track record for leadership and project management and the coordination of technical assistance. She was instrumental in authoring the Wisconsin Public Health Association (WPHA) Racism is a Public Health Crisis, 2018 resolution. She facilitated the adoption of this resolution in Milwaukee, marking the first municipality to do so.
kim thompson (she/her) is a politicized queer Korean-American-adoptee interdisciplinary artist and freelance copyeditor/copywriter who was legally trafficked from Seoul, South Korea to the States via the adoption industrial complex. She is the past recipient of several state and national grants for performance and writing–including the 2008 Jerome Travel Grant for Literature. Her work on the page and stage has appeared at several artistic venues in Minneapolis, MN, in various domestic and international adoptee-centric publications, and in South Korean feminist journal ILDA. kim is the recent recipient of the 2023 Oregon Literary Fellowship, and is currently in the early stages of working on creating an illustrated memoir.
Gila K. Berryman (she/her) is an educator, writer, and copyeditor who grapples with themes of race, class, gender, and sexuality in her writing. Her work has appeared in Entropy, Lilith Magazine, Mobius: The Journal for Social Change, Stitch, Transition Magazine, ELLE, and YES! Magazine. As a copyeditor, Gila is committed to polishing meaningful writing so that it’s clear and accessible to all readers. And as an educator, she is passionate about teaching the skills necessary for students to express themselves confidently in writing and to tell their own stories, in college, in the workforce, and beyond.