Queer Art Impact presents Gay Wars: The Thursday Conversation

GAY WARS: THE QUEER ECOLOGY // May 15 - 21, 2011 //  A week-long, New York City festival of performances, panels and meet-ups to unravel the queerness of human interaction. Join us as we celebrate QAI's one year anniversary with the launch of so much pre-pride hotness. queerai.com for details.

Brian McCormick // Moderator // is an arts activist, writer, Producing Director of Nicholas Leichter Dance, and part-time Assistant Professor at The New School in the Media Studies MA program. He is a long-time contributing dance editor for Gay City News, where as arts editor from 2005-2007 he earned the paper a New York Press Association award. Since 2003 he has also taught TRaC—the Teen Reviewers and Critics program of Arts Connection/High 5 Tickets to the Arts. He has been a panelist, moderator, guest curator, and/or adjudicator for Theater Communications Group, New York Foundation for the Arts, Joyce Theater Foundation, Dance Theater Workshop, Brooklyn Arts Council, The Field, Hunter College Dance Department, Kinetic Cinema, LMCC, Movement Research, The A.W.A.R.D. Show, CMJ Music Marathon, Queer Art Impact, and BETA and Mixed Messages at The New School. He has done marketing, and audience engagement work for the American Dance Festival, Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project, Dancing in the Streets, and Scholastic Arts; and reporting work for Dance Theater Workshop and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Brian is a member of the New York Dance and Performance Awards (Bessies) committee and he is on the board of Under The Rainbow. @bmacmedia bmacmedia.net

Conversation Leaders //

Dechen Albero is the Program Coordinator for the Global Studies Program at The New School where he coordinates the Coming Out in the Developing World lecture and discussion series and serves as faculty advisor to the Global Gender and Sexuality student workgroup and Queerocracy. He previously served in the United States Peace Corps to Moldova where he directed the Gender, Youth and Development program and worked as a consultant for Gender-Doc M, the country’s leading gay and lesbian advocacy organization. He holds an MA and MPhil in Politics from the New School for Social Research and an MA in Philosophy and Cultural Analysis from the Universiteit of Amsterdam. Currently, he is working on his Ph.D dissertation which focuses on gender, sexuality and citizenship in post-genocide Rwanda. He is also in the initial stages of developing an edited collection based on the Coming Out in the Developing World lectures.

Camilo Godoy is a visual artist and an activist studying in New York City. He was born in Bogotá, Colombia in 1989 and immigrated to the U.S.A. with his mother in 1999. Currently, he is a third year student pursuing a BFA in Photography at Parsons The New School for Design and a BA in Education Studies at Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts. Godoy's academic research and practice as an artist is particularly focused in the opposition of immigrant detention and the heteronormative policies and practices that seduce us to participate in the logics of hegemonic nationalist projects. He works with QUEEROCRACY - a  grassroots organization made up of people exploring queerness and working to promote social justice.

Tahira Pratt is a member of the Audre Lorde Project's Safe OUTside the System Collective, and was a 2009-2010 fellow with Social Justice Leadership, where she did grassroots housing justice organizing in the South Bronx with Mothers on the Move. Much of her eight years of community and campus organizing has been around LGBTQ rights, racial justice, and anti-violence work. Tahira is a 2008 graduate of Tufts University with a double major in Psychology and American Studies, and is a proud native of Washington, DC.

S(hirley)(ENA)Torho, a Gates Scholar and sociomedical scientist, is dedicated to physical, emotional, psychological, & spiritual healing through the intersection of arts, activism, and science. A psychology major and women’s studies minor at Barnard College, she developed a passion for understanding the impact of socio-cultural factors such as capital, community investment, access, & structural policies on health disparities in urbanizing populations, which she continued to nurture as a graduate student at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. She continually works to empower disenfranchised youth and broken individuals in traumatized communities, and is Interested in bridging traditional, holistic wellness practices with western therapies, and delivering this health model through a pragmatic, culturally-sensitive approach.