Trans Oral History Project Collective Organizers
Aviva Silverman is an artist and a triple Aries living in Chinatown, New York, who works in sculpture and performance. Their practice engages with religion, gender nonconformity, and nonhuman actors to revisit existing forms, in particular, technologies of spiritual and political surveillance. They do organizing work with prison-abolition and Palestinian-solidarity groups in New York City, and are interested broadly in community-based healing through narrative, diasporic Judaism and mysticism, and science fiction.
Sebastián Castro Niculescu is a former intern turned collective member with the NYC TOHP. She is a trans Latina writer, artist, organizer/curator and performer originally from the NYC metropolitan area. Sebastián is currently a Mellon fellow studying Ethnic Studies at Brown University and Sculpture at RISD. Her research lies between Latinx Studies, Trans Studies, Critical Race Theory, and Performance Studies.
Former Collective Members and Interns
Adelaide/Matthew Dicken is a non-binary Pisces transwoman theatre-maker and resource-mover of European descent living in a collective home in Flatbush, Brooklyn. She organizes in grassroots abolitionist movements committed to mutual aid for incarcerated queer and trans people of color, freeing criminalized survivors, and building support structures towards economic self-determination for people working for trans & disability justice.
Jay Toole is an activist and storyteller with over fifteen years of experience organizing around LGBT homelessness issues, and forty years of experience navigating homelessness herself in NYC. From 2002-2012, Jay was a co-founder and Shelter Director at Queers for Economic Justice (QEJ), which became the first LGBT organization to facilitate support groups for queer individuals within the NYC shelter system.
Elliott Maya was a community outreach intern for the NYC TOHP. They are a black nonbinary writer who graduated from Grinnell College with an undergraduate degree in English; gender, women’s, and sexuality studies; and American studies. Their research focuses on the lives and well-being of black trans women, black butch women, and black non-binary individuals.
Kamryn Wolf is a queer and nonbinary activist, artist and graduate student at Union Theological Seminary in NYC, where they are studying chaplaincy and spiritual care with transgender and gender nonconforming people. They bring to NYC TOHP a concern with care work, spirituality, racial and economic justice, and collective action.