Adrian Lahoud is Dean of the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art. Prior to his current role at RCA, he was Director of the MA at the Centre for Research Architecture Goldsmiths University and a research fellow in the Forensic Architecture ERC project, Studio master in the Projective Cities MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design at the Architectural Association and Director of the MArch Urban Design, Bartlett UCL. Recent exhibits include The Shape of the Eclipse at Let’s Talk about the Weather: Art and Ecology in a Time of Crisis Sursock Museum Beirut, Secular Cosmologies in After Belonging Triennial of Architecture Oslo, and Floating Bodies at Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin. He has also contributed to Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s Anthropocene Curriculum and Technosphere projects. 

Akanksha Mehta is a lecturer in international relations at the University of Sussex where she teaches courses on gender, sexuality, and political violence. She finished her PhD at the Centre for Gender Studies at SOAS, writing a dissertation on the everyday politics of women in right-wing movements, specifically looking at Hindu Nationalist women in India and Zionist Israeli settlers in the West Bank, occupied Palestine. Her research used ethnography, narratives, and visual methods to interrogate how gender and sexuality intersect with the politics and violence of the far-right. She is also a photographer who uses visual work to document the complexities, intricacies, and banalities of post colonial life, migrant communities, race, gender, and sexuality. She can be reached at www.twitter.com/SahibanInExile. 

Alexandra Wanjiku Kelbert is a researcher, lecturer and London-based activist with Black Lives Matter UK. She also works with female asylum-seekers and refugees.

Social media handle

@WanjiKelbert

Ama Josephine Budge is a London/Accra - based writer, curator and artist whose work navigates explorations of race, diaspora and feminism. Ama was a writer, curator and later co-editor-in-Cheif of HYSTERIA feminist collective from August 2014 - June 2016. Ama worked with Autograph ABP's Missing Chapter Collective from 2015-16. Ama has also been interviewed by Vice and Dazed Digital, written for The Independent and RoadFemme amongst other subversive publications. Ama is also co-founder of new black queer art and club night Batty Mama, and is currently programming the anti-conference I/Mages of Tomorrow hosted by the Centre for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths. Ama has a background in performance art with a BA in Contemporary Performance Practice and is currently a student of the MA in Postcolonial Culture and Global Policy at Goldsmiths University working on a thesis exploring Queer Modes of Encounter with Climate Colonialism and Pleasure.

Anni Movsisyan is interested in reimagining the world and unpicking our understandings of power and their legacies in order to facilitate a nuanced dialogue around the colonial matrix we live within. Her practice tries to imagine ways of de-linking from coloniality that could be realised in relation to her context as an Armenian-Iranian person born living in the West, perceived as white/assimilated or non-white in different situations, and gendered as a woman. With performance, music and other media, she intends to produce new knowledge in forms that have long been dismissed.

Instagram: @_peacock_paradise_  Twitter: @AnniMovsisyan

Awuor Onyango is a Nairobi-based writer, artist, photographer, filmmaker and gallerist. Her
practice is concerned with claiming public space disallowed to people considered
black, woman and other, whether the space is intellectual, physical, in memory or
Historical. She’s currently exploring the transgression, shame and discomfort of the black feminine. 

Cai Zhang appropriates experience and practice uniquely initiated in the digital space to the physical world and the individual corporeality. She employs performance, drawing and writing to investigate internet as psychological space and question what it means to be digitally human. Zhang is a Sculpture graduate from Wimbledon College of Art, and curretnly lives and works in London. (www.cai.gallery)

Chandra Frank (Dutch/South African) is a PhD candidate and independent curator. She holds an MPhil in African Studies from the University of Cape Town and is currently a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work is focused on the Black, Migrant and Refugee women’s movement in the Netherlands during the 1980s. She explores the role of archives, Black and brown transnational feminist genealogy and the politics of pleasure and intimacy. In her curatorial practice, Frank is interested in uncovering hidden queer stories, refiguring the archive and thinking towards decolonial and queer modes of research, curating and healing. To this end, Frank has written various articles, given lectures and presented papers. She has written for Africa is A Country, Discover Society, Warscapes and is published in Third Text Africa. In 2016, Frank was a Curatorial Fellow at the Institute of Creative Arts (University of Cape Town). website: www.chandrafrank.com

Born in 1991 in Owerri State, Nigeria, Chinasa Vivian Ezugha is a performance artist living and working in Norwich, UK. Influenced by her cultural heritage in Nigeria and the diaspora of black women in history. Ezugha’ s work has been described as ‘powerful and commanding’.

Recent activities include, In Between Time Festival, (New Blood artist), SPILL National Platform artist, Radical Idea Commission (Rich Mix Theatre), Sala Rekalde, Bilbao, Spain (Film screening of ‘The Mothers Who Carried Me’ as part of ECOS #10 Helena Goñi). Because of hair; the dichotomy of culture and identity, funded by Arts Council England, Performance Art Oslo & PAS Guest Tutor (Performance Art Studies), Norway. 

Daisy Kaother Jeanrenaud is a 19 year old French-Tunisian creative living in London. From a young age she has always had an eye for photography and is currently nearing the end of her photography A level. She is particularly interested in PoC's personal histories, thoughts and feelings and ensuring that people who often go unheard have a chance to voice themselves. In September she will be commencing a degree in History at Goldsmiths, whilst still doing photography in her spare time.

Dean Atta has been described by the Huffington Post as “one of the leading lights in London's poetry scene” and by Apples and Snakes as “unafraid to tackle topics other poets turn a blind eye to".

His debut collection, I Am Nobody’s Nigger, published by the Westbourne Press, was shortlisted for the Polari First Book Prize.

He was named as one of the most influential LGBT people in the UK by the Independent on Sunday Pink List and featured in Out News Global Pride Power List.

He is currently working on his second poetry collection The Black Flamingo. 

Sunanda Mesquita is a visual artist, curator and co-founder of WE DEY- platform for contemporary arts. In her artistic practice she focuses on possibilities of a radical, utopian, queer, feminist collectivity of Black and People of Color and the topics of community, solidarity and belonging. Her illustrations are published under the alias @decolonial_killjoy.

Deniz Unal works as an artist and teacher. For the past few years she has been making performances, writing and researching under the umbrella title Health-E, which looks at discourses that surrounds illness and healing. For I/Mages of Tomorrow she’ll be considering how certain BDSM practices can form new ways of thinking and in turn, alternative strategies to how we view illness, pain and suffering.  Deniz Unal is from Istanbul and grew up in Enfield, North London. Recent other names for Deniz include Deniz ‘muscles’ Unal, Mc Xselans and Tron 45. Denizunal.org

Recent recipient of AFAC (Arab Fund for Arts and Culture) Performing Arts Grant 2016 for her unique performance based practice of storytelling 'LPP' (Live.Projection.Painting); Estabrak is an award winning Visual Artist & Film Maker based between London, UK and Muscat, Oman. She is originally from Iraq, born in Iran and raised in London, after having come to the UK with her family as a child refugee. With an arts background in Central Saint Martins and a Masters in film & media production, she is both by nature & nurture; a storyteller. Often lead by personal experience & emotions, particular interest lies in honest approaches to silenced socio-political realities usually explored through progressive, multidisciplinary ways of storytelling. Regularly providing and highlighting much needed space for female stories & voices.

Evan Ifekoya is an interdisciplinary artist, exploring the politicisation of culture, society and aesthetics. Appropriated material from historical archives and contemporary society make up the work. By ‘queerying’ popular imagery and utilising the props of everyday life, Ifekoya aims to destroy the aura of preciousness surrounding art. Ifekoya’s current work investigates the possibility of an erotic and poetic occupation using film, performative writing and sound, focused on co-authored, intimate forms of knowledge production and the radical potential of spectacle.  Their ongoing project 'A Score, A Groove, A Phantom' explores archives of blackness, sociality and inheritance as they diffract through queer nightlife and trauma in the present moment​ as a way of invoking new futures​.​ Ifekoya is an Art Foundation Fellow in Live Art for 2017. Collaborative projects include Collective Creativity: Critical reflections into QTIPOC creative practice and Network11.

​

Gail Lewis is an academic in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College and a psychotherapist. Her political subjectivity was formed in the intensities of black feminist and anti-racist struggle and through a socialist, anti-imperialist lens. She was a member of the Brixton Black Women's Group and one of the founder members of the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent. She has written on feminism, intersectionality, the welfare state, and racialised-gendered experience.  Her publications include ‘Birthing Racial Difference: conversations with my mother and others’ (2009) Studies in the Maternal; ‘Unsafe Travel: experiencing intersectionality and feminist displacements’ (2013) Signs: journal of women in culture and society;  ‘Where Might I Find You’: Popular Music and the Internal Space of the Father’, (2012) Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. She believes that intergenerational conversations are among the most urgent in these times. She is an Arsenal fan.

Hannah Catherine Jones (aka Foxy Moron) is an artist, scholar, multi-instrumentalist, radio presenter (NTS), composer, conductor and founder of Peckham Chamber Orchestra – a community project established in 2013. Jones’ broad practice is connected through a central spine of decolonization. The videos she composes use fragmented appropriated footage, as do her orchestral compositions. Her Oweds are a temporal form of self-reparation, a method of connecting with ancestry though sonic ritual using voice, theremin and video. Jones has recently commenced a DPhil scholarship to The Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University (Christ Church) exploring the relationship between Afrofuturism and Gesamtkunstwerk through the art-music of Sun Ra and Wagner. Jones has performed, exhibited and lectured internationally including Oxford, Goldsmiths, Harvard, NYU, Umuzi Academy (SA) Liquid Architecture (AUS) and Beirut Arts Centre. foxymoron.co.uk.

Imani Robinson is a London-born and based British-Caribbean, African-American organiser, writer and curator. Her work focuses on resisting anti-Black racism and building radical consciousness of the queer black feminist kind through movement-building, art, education and dialogue. She channels her work through Black Lives Matter UK and sorryyoufeeluncomfortable, a collective that uses art practice to interrogate dominant discourses. Imani is also a contributor to Huck and Ceasefire Magazine and recently presented at TedxLimassol.

Irene (Tokini) Fubara-Manuel is a Niger-Deltan animator and researcher based in Brighton. For six years, she lived in Canada where she completed her undergraduate degree. She is currently a doctoral student at the University of Sussex, where she researches biometric technologies as racialized surveillance, charting resistance through opacity. A self-taught animator, her recent work includes I'm New Here (2015), a 2D animated series in which queer African migrants in Winnipeg (Canada) share stories and images of their lives. In her animation/installation project Border Ritual (2016), Tokini cathartically re-enacts her interview with a UK border agent. This project exhibited in a group show, “Wheel ‘n’ Come Again” at Hastings Art Forum, ONCA and Fabrica. Tokini continues to build on this project, dissenting against the criminalization and hypersurveillance of migrants.

Jacob V Joyce is a non binary interdisciplinary artist that disrupts commercial and community spaces with queer and anti-colonial, creative interventions. As a member of the sorryyoufeeluncomfortable collective and the front person for the band Screaming Toenail, Joyce's work brings satirical and theatrical critiques to institutional and every day instances of marginalisation. As well as self-publishing a number of illustrated books addressing a variety of political issues, Joyce performs spoken word and solo electronic music which combines ritualistic voice looping with poetic strategies of resistance.

Jennifer Younge is a Philadelphian born fine artist, curator and activist. She received her BA in Art focused in Digital Media from the Tyler School of Art in 2012 and is currently attending Kingston University’s Museum & Gallery Studies Masters Program. Jen has a background in art gallery work as well as community activism and her professional philosophy is centered around creating and making space where art is for everyone.

Kai Isaiah Jamal is a spoken word poet who addresses issues regarding race, masculinity and gender from a perspective of a transgender man. In his practice he displays personal writing and open safe discussion to bring both awareness and an authentic insight. Also attempting to deconstruct mounds regarding gender and stereotypes within/against the black community which influences hypermacsulinity, fetishisation and creates unavailability of queer poc to use platforms to speak on matters that he tries to. By creating the dialogue he does he wishes to highlight the importance of inclusion, acceptance and understanding of trans p(oc) by using a medium he finds most successful in connecting with an audience. 

Keith Jarrett is a former UK Poetry Slam Champion and writes poetry and short fiction. In 2014, he completed the pioneering Spoken Word Educators programme, teaching in a secondary school while studying for an MA at Goldsmiths University. Since being awarded a PhD studentship at Birkbeck University of London, he is now researching the social impact of Pentecostalism in London and completing his first novel. “Keith Jarrett’s poems combine a rhetorical purposefulness with a smart and adventurous imagination” – Jack Underwood, on I Speak Home.

Kodwo Eshun is author of More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction(1998). He is also one half of the Otolith Group, founded in 2002, alongside Anjalika Sagar. The group explore the moving image, the archive, the sonic and the aural within the gallery context. Eshun was educated at University College, Oxford, and works as a writer, lecturer and D.J.. He won the Best Journalist Award at the First International Techno Congress in Berlin, and was a judge on the Digital Music Jury at Ars Electronica, Linz and the International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen, Germany. He contributes regularly to a number of journals including ID and The Wire. He currently teaches the MA in Geopoetics special subject in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

KUCHENGA is a writer, an agitator an avid consumer of all culture high and low. She is a Black trans feminist whose work sparkles with vivacity and originality. A member of Black Lives Matter UK, the Bent Bars Collective and Sisters Uncut she lives by the Thames in Battersea and can be found frollicking in the park with her dog Nene.

**Sadly Lerato will not be able to join us due to visa restrictions, but remains a part of the anticonference conversation and community.

Lerato Shadi’s artistic practice is a way of placing herself in the world—as a woman, as a Black woman, as a South African. She explores problematic assumptions projected onto the Black female body and how performance, video and installation create a space for artists to engage with those preconceived notions, making the body both visible and invisible. Using time, repetitive actions as well as stillness.

Shadi lives and works in Berlin. In 2012 her work was featured at the ‘Dak’art Biennale’, and in the ‘III Moscow International Biennale’. In 2014 her performance, ‘Makhubu’ was showcased at Iniva in London. Shadi was awarded with the mart stam studio grant, Berlin in 2014. Shadi presented her solo show ‘Noka Ya Bokamoso’ at the National Arts Festival 2016 in South Africa. In the same year she exhibited her solo show ‘Di Dikadika Tsa Dinaledi’ at Goethe Institut, Johannesburg. She is the winner of the ‘Alumni Dignitas Award’ of the University of Johannesburg in 2016. Shadi is participant of the ‘NSK State Pavilion’ at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. 

Lynx Sainte-Marie, Afro+Goth Poet, is a multimedium artist, activist and educator of the Jamaican diaspora, with ancestral roots indigenous to Africa and the British Isles. A disabled/chronically ill, non-binary/genderfluid person, they currently reside in what’s commonly known as the Greater Toronto Area, stolen land of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Huron-Wendat, Mississaugas of New Credit, Petun and Seneca peoples. A poet across mediums, Lynx utilizes multiple art forms – writing, performance, visual art, storytelling, multimedia art installation and song – to engage audiences around issues of identity, oppression, liberation, resiliency and survival at the intersection. Lynx has presented, lectured and served as a keynote speaker at the national and international level, as well as trained a plethora of individuals and organizations on various issues related to marginalized communities. Their work has appeared in Black Girl Dangerous, OCHUN: Watah Poetry Anthology Book I, Plenitude Magazine, The Peak Magazine and The Deaf Poets Society. For more about Lynx, check out their website: http://lynxsaintemarie.com

Mama D is a community researcher and learning facilitator working at different social interfaces using community-centred narratives, drama and intergenerational performances. She embraces and endorses the ways of the Earth in terms of diversity and intersectionality from a place of pluriversal consciousness and practice. Having worked with communities in Africa, the Caribbean and the UK, she is enthusiastic about the benefits of lifelong learning; growing from and with the land and alternative forms of education.

Mattie Loyce, currently based in London, UK is the founder/director of Project Mission Gallery and co-founder of The Art of Life After, a community based healing project for survivors of sexual violence. She was born and raised in San Francisco, CA but has spent a large part of her life living nomadically. Her experience traveling, building chosen family, being immersed in different cultures, and finding common threads between spaces all have taken part in the inspiring the creation of Mission Gallery. She playfully refers to Mission Gallery as a 'Guerilla Art Gallery'; to date completing exhibitions across both the east and west coasts of the U.S.A. and the city of London. She is deeply inspired by community building, expressive arts, sharing ancestral and contemporary histories, and organizing for healing and justice through the arts.

Meena Kandasamy is a poet, fiction writer, translator and activist who lives in London. She has published two collections of poetry, Touch (2006) and Ms. Militancy (2010) and has performed her work at literature festivals around the world. The Gypsy Goddess (2014), her critically-acclaimed novel was chosen as Independent newspaper’s debut of the year and shortlisted for several awards. Her second novel, When I Hit You: Or, The Portrait Of The Writer As A Young Wife was published this year. She was a fellow of the International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa in 2009, and a British Council Charles Wallace Trust Fellow in 2011. She holds a PhD in sociolinguistics and has written for Al Jazeera, The Hindu, India Today, Himal, Newsweek Middle East, among other places. Her work has appeared in eighteen languages.

January 01, 2020

Michelle Daley is a proud black disabled woman, born and raised in the East End of London to Jamaican parents that moved to England in the 1950’s. Michelle has worked in the disability field for over 15 years on international, national and local issues for public sector and voluntary organisations. Michelle has sat on the Equality 2025 – the United Kingdom Advisory Network on Disability Equality and Office for Disability Issues: Independent Living Scrutiny Group, as well as spoken at a large number of conferences and festivals across the United Kingdom. www.daleymichelle.co.uk.

MADEYOULOOK is an inter-disciplinary artist collaboration made up of Nare Mokgotho and Molemo Moiloa. The works of MADEYOULOOK often reference everyday innovations; aspects of inner-city life that find simple solutions to ordinary challenges. Notions of knowledge production and access to ownership in he wider sense are central to our thinking.  Related to this is MADEYOULOOK’s broader interest in art’s relation to audience, concepts of publics and what constitutes an audience. DIY serves as a typical approach, not only to our interests, but also to our own functioning. Molemo Moiloa is Director of the Visual Arts Network of South Africa (VANSA), and one half of artists collaborative MADEYOULOOK. She has degrees in Fine Arts and Social Anthropology, writes sometimes, and is interested in popular social pedagogies and everyday socio-political imaginary.

Nazmia Jamal is probably best described as an interested party. She is often to be found on the noisy periphery or at the quiet centre of feminist or queer happenings and has poked her fingers into a surprising number of pies since arriving in London in the late 1990s. She is a teacher, activist, film programmer and curator of sorts and currently works in arts education. 

Raju Rage is an interdisciplinary artist who is proactive about using art, education and activism to forge creative survival. 

Based in London and working beyond, they primarily use their non-conforming body as a vehicle of embodied knowledge; to bridge the gap between dis/connected bodies, theory and practice, text and the body and aesthetics and the political substance. They work in performance, sculpture, soundscapes and moving image, focusing on techniques of resistance and utilising everyday objects and everyday life experiences in communicating narratives around gender, race and culture. They investigate history, memory and trauma, with an emphasis on colonial legacy, its continuation and impact on the body and contemporary diasporan identity.

They are an organiser and member of Collective Creativity arts collective and a creative educator with an interest in radical pedagogy.

Rudy Loewe is a visual artist utilising narratives from lived experience to create comics and illustrations predominantly focusing on the lives of black people. Rudy’s intention is to take complex ideas and narratives, drawing them out into more accessible and digestible formats. Using comedy and satire Rudy’s work subverts dominant power structures and starts difficult conversations around intersectionality. Often using comic book format Rudy’s work centres people of colour celebrating and chronicling their stories. Racism; gender; sexuality; disability and mental health are all key themes within Rudy’s practice. They uses a variety of mediums throughout and recurring motifs to explore family history, black history, Diaspora and trauma. Rudy Loewe’s practice often involves working with archival material and with other practitioners such as historians and archivists. The pedagogical side of Rudy’s practice has been inspired by theorists such as bell hooks and Paulo Friere and their ideas around community and learning. Rudy’s work aims to engage those who consider themselves outside of the art world in art practice. Community is an integral part of Rudy Loewe’s work, which is why another facet of their practice is workshop facilitation and the invaluable conversations that come out of this. They/ them pronouns. www.rudyloewe.com

Salt Freeandsingle is a writer, artist, juju practitioner, performer and organiser in London who does work with Black Lives Matter London, Sluts of Blackness and Plantain Foundation. She makes sit down comedy about child sex abuse and runs workshops on writing and healing. She is allegedly following a salt free diet. 

Shela Sheikh is Lecturer at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London, where she convenes the MA Postcolonial Culture and Global Policy. Prior to this she was Research Fellow and Publications Coordinator on the ERC-funded “Forensic Architecture” project based in the Centre for Research Architecture. She is currently working on a monograph about the phenomenon of the “martyr video-testimony” and its cultural representation, read primarily through the lens of deconstruction; and a multi-platform collaborative research project around colonialism, botany and the politics of planting. Within the context of the latter, she is co-editing, with Ros Gray, a special issue of Third Text entitled “The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions” (Spring 2018). 

Sita Balani is an Associate Lecturer at Goldsmiths College and Birkbeck College, teaching in the Centre for Cultural Studies and Psychosocial Studies respectively. She completed her PhD in English Literature at King’s College London.Her research explores neoliberalism, national identity and the ‘War on Terror’ in contemporary British cultural production, drawing on novels, memoirs, films and performances. She has contributed to Feminist Review, Open Democracy, Ceasefire, Photoworks, and Novara Media. 

Skye is a visual activist and a self identified 'ancestral Shona wife', gay Zimbabwean/African. She uses the art form to raise awareness and interrogate geo political and human-rights issues drawn from personal experiences- 'the personal is political'. Recently, Skye has focused on the narrative of homosexuality/ homophobia on the continent of Africa,  as well as highlighting issues affecting LGBTI asylum seekers and refugees  and queer Africans across the borders. Skye has contributed to discourse at The Commonwealth writers, University of East Anglia, SOAS university of London and BFI Lesbian and Gay film festival. In 2008 Skye won a community achievement award and in 2009 was nominated for a BEFFTA award. Currently, she is a Forensic Psychologist In Training. Image credit Tokini Fubara.

Talia Sharpp is a student researcher at Hampton University, an HBCU in Virginia, USA. She is currently studying abroad at SOAS, University of London and will complete her bachelor of science in political science in May 2018. Talia’s previous research worked to understand the ways in which Black women in the Black Panther Party for Self Defense translated the theory of the organization to community action at the national and local level. Currently, she is considering the memoirs of female members of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense as dystopian narratives, specifically A Taste of Power by Elaine Brown, and analyzing creative political implications and interventions necessary to create and/or restore order and justice to their societies.  She is committed to utilizing this research as a framework for a civic education program that utilizes Black women’s literature to develop young women of color into political agents and to empower them to write their own stories. In addition to her research, Talia is a tutor and the co-founder of the community organization F(read)om School, a program for middle school students designed to encourage exploration of identity and expression through literature. Website: freadomfighter.org email: taliasharpp@gmail.com

Taylor Dominique Mason is a writer, actor and creative consultant exercising the use of visual art, performance and bodywork as tools in healing mental illness and trauma. Taylor has worked in the cross hairs of arts, community organizing and politics for ten years with non-profits, universities and the US House of Representatives. A Los Angeles native, she has lived and worked in South Africa, Mexico, Oakland and London. Her first short form web series, The Sum of Us, is currently in pre-production and explores topics of mental illness, polyamory and chosen family among queer millennials. Her written work has been published in For Harriet and The Huffington Post, and can be found at her website, www.amberlazuli.com. 

Tjoa Shze Hui is a Chinese-Singaporean writer and researcher based in London. She runs Hinterland, a zine that explores alternative futures in Singapore and broader East Asia, claiming discursive space for individuals who have been 'othered' by geopolitical and institutional norms. Her background is in criticism and cultural studies, with a focus on the aesthetic sensibility of postcolonial subjects in South East Asia.

Tosin Coker is celebrated as one of Science Fiction’s most talented and refreshing players, with four novels already on the shelves. The UK market had never seen works released by a black female writer in this genre before. ‘The Mouth of Babes', Let Sleeping Gods Lie’, ‘Heaven's War: The Gods Awakened’ and ‘2013 Evolution’ and the much anticipated prequel, ‘Chronicles of Zauba'ah’ have brought Coker much acclaim. The birth of Coker's third child inspired to delve into creating a series of preschooler dual language books in Yoruba and Twi (dominant Nigerian and Ghanaian languages). Calling upon her life experience as a inheritor of Sickle Cell Anaemia, Coker further expressed her versatility as an author, by penning an educational non-fiction title on the subject of the blood disorder. However Coker primarily identifies as being a metaphysical sci-fi author. Through her novels, Coker stimulates educates and entertains, injecting spiritual wisdom through the infectious personalities of her characters to whom readers readily relate. 

Travis Alabanza is a performance artist and poet. Their work revolves around Black, trans, working class and queer identities - and constantly trying to find ways to create a voice in a silencing world. Currently the 2016/17 artist and resident at the Tate, their one person show ‘Stories of A Queer Brown Muddy Kid’ sold out venues such as RVT, Housman's Bookstore, Oxford Queer Week and Hamburg International Festival. Listed as one of the up-and-coming queer artists in Artsy 2016, their work and performances have also toured venues such as Rich Mix, Transmissions Gallery, Tate Britain, Oxford Queer Week, Watershed & are published in Black Girl Dangerous, Barbican Poetry Anthology, and Not Trans Enough Zine. 

Victoria Sin is a London based artist concerned with the experience of the physical body within the social body, and speculative fiction as a productive strategy of queer resistance.  Their work explores desire, identification and objectification within systems of looking and technologies of representation within an image based culture.  They work across performance, moving image, narratives, installation, and print, and use drag to invade technologies of representation; in popular print magazines, on screen, and on stage, serving to invade the means of production and reification of ideal imagery, and to challenge gender binaries, expectations and attitudes on femme identities and how images and iconography of femininity are produced, inscribed, and performed.

Whiskey Chow is an artist and writer based in London, UK. Coming from an activism background of China, Whiskey has been working with female masculinity, stereotypes and cultural projection of Chinese/Asian identity in her practice. Interdisciplinarily making performance, moving image and experimental sound piece, Whiskey's works are context sensitive, which move between gallery space and live art scene. Prior moving to the UK, Whiskey has been involved in feminist and LGBTQ activism in China since she was 20. She has worked closely with local queer communities in Guangzhou and contributed as actor, co-playwright and sound designer in the production of ‘For Vaginas’ Sake’ (將陰道獨白到底, Original Chinese version of The Vagina Monologues). 

The Women of Colour Index (WOCI) Reading Group was initiated in October 2016 by artists Michelle Williams Gamaker, Samia Malik and Rehana Zaman. WOCI Reading Group workshops currently take place twice a month at the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths University. During these sessions artwork by women of colour artists held in an index at the Women’s Art Library are explored. The WOCI Reading Group aims to improve the visibility of women of colour artists and create a framework for engaging with these works. Critical discussion is encouraged through performative readings, text, audio and film. WOCI welcomes people from all backgrounds, genders, religions, sexualities and races.

Xana is a live loop musician, sound designer and installation artist working at the intersection of tech and the arts. Ze focus on interrogating the next evolution of queerness within futurism, inclusivity in tech, narratives of migration, trauma/depression and archives as the basis for redefining the voice of the other. Over the past year Ze have been looking at how data would not exist without the people and that big data is the currency of our time. Particularly how data is transforming our lives, by the way it is collected and valued and how the interpretation of that data is crucial to the future of marginalised people. Ze are taking part in Ze first ever group exhibition with a sound installation at Tranmissions Gallery in Glasgow based on the theme of depersonalisation. xa-na.com

Yasmin Gunaratnam is a Reader in Sociology at Goldsmiths where she teaches on race, feminism, disability, cultural representation and research methods. Her monographs include 'Researching Race and Ethnicity: methods, knowledge and power' (2003, Sage), ‘Death and the Migrant’ (2013, Bloomsbury Academic) and ‘Go Home? The Politics of Immigration Controversies’ (2017, Manchester University Press). Yasmin has edited seven collections including ‘A Jar of Wild Flowers: Essays in Celebration of John Berger’ (2016, Zed). She is on the editorial collectives of Feminist Review and Media Diversified.

Zara Julius is a multidisciplinary visual storyteller based in Johannesburg, with a background in social anthropology and photography. Zara’s work explores the intersection of ethnographic research and visual art. Concerned with the ethics of representation, Zara’s use of co-productive visual methodologies help ensure her subject areas are triangulated – rupturing the binaries implicit in written modes. Her work is concerned with the relationship between aesthetics and culture, African futures, and the varying paradoxes that emerge with the interplay of identity, faith, religion, urbanity, migration, race, and desire in Africa and the African diaspora. Zara has written various articles, presented university lectures and exhibited her work across South Africa, and internationally. 

Raised in Tottenham, North London, Zena Edwards graduated from Middlesex University in Drama and Communication Studies, has been involved in writing for  performance for 20 years. She is the co-founder, core project developer and facilitator for radical youth arts education project, 'Voices That Shake', was an associate artist and facilitator for English Pen International and as Creative and Education Director of the independent company Verse In Dialogue (©ViD), an umbrella company focused on cross art collaboration for social change. In February 2017, Zena collaborated with Apples and Snakes poetry organization, UCL, and the Bloomsbury Festival  to produce "Human Code Computer Tongue" -  a convening of poets, coders and linguists to creatively and interactively  discuss how technology assists the literary arts, creates of stories that sustain, digital justice and the value of a healthy relationship between the artificial Intelligence and human creativity.