curator 

The Wide World of Lesbian Cats excavates a history of cat memes in lesbian, feminist and queer cultural productions from the 1970s to the present. Although cats are most closely associated with the Internet, simple line drawings of cats also routinely appeared in books and periodicals that came out of the women in print movement in the 1970s. Similarly, in the 1980s and 1990s, lesbian comic artists like Alison Bechdel and Diane DiMassa frequently depicted cats in their popular serials Dykes to Watch Out For and Hothead Paisan. In following cats from print to digital culture, The Wide World of Lesbian Cats explores the enduring appeal of cats to lesbian, feminist and queer political projects.

twitter  

curatorial team 

The New-York Historical Society commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising and the dawn of the gay liberation movement with a suite of exhibitions that opened in May 2019. Stonewall 50 at New-York Historical Society was comprised of two exhibitions and a special installation, as well as public programs for all ages. 

website

contributor 

I was one of 38 contemporary queer culture makers invited to produce original work for OUT/LOOK and the Birth of the Queer, a digital and physical exhibit at the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco. My task was to respond to a specific issue of the groundbreaking queer magazine OUT/LOOK in a medium of my choice. I created a research guide that used Issue 12 as a point of entry to explore the vast holdings of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, the oldest and largest lesbian archive in the world. As well as surveying the content of this issue in relation to LHA's collection, my research guide is interested in the resonances between the topics covered in OUT/LOOK and the current moment in queer studies. What are the stakes of researching topics like gay families or queerness in Russia? And what can we learn from returning to this archive of the recent queer past? 

website | research guide

co-curator 

A collaboration between the Lesbian Herstory Archives and Interference Archive, Take Back the Fight: Resisting Sexual Violence from the Ground Up narrated a history of feminist, queer, and anti-racist responses to gender and sexual violence,  highlighting the ways individuals and communities have developed creative and powerful grassroots and non-institutional justice and healing practices. The exhibition coincided with a series of public events in order to collectively engage with the exhibition material, relating the histories presented to ongoing efforts to end and heal from sexual violence.

website

My graduate course on Queer Art and Archives asks how contemporary artists use archives. For their final project, students answered this question by developing their own creative projects based on archival research. Projects included a deck of Lotería cards depicting figures from local queer Lantix history; textile recreations of activist buttons; and a twine game based on letters exchanged between a lesbian couple in the 1930s. As well as developing their own project, students collaborated on a digital exhibit, built with Omeka, an open-source web-publishing platform, that showcases their projects. 

digital exhibit

The students in my Perspectives in Gender and Sexuality class worked together on an in class mapping activity after reading a chapter of George Chauncey's Gay New York about the emergence of gay enclaves in Harlem and the Village. The map includes the approximate locations and descriptions of hangouts mentioned in the chapter. 

The students in my LGBTQ Digital History class collaborated on a visualization of lesbian feminist networks. Each student looked at one oral history interview from Smith’s Voices of Feminism oral history project. They listed everyone mentioned in the interview and worked together on spreadsheets that I then imported into Gephi, an open source platform for visualizing networks. 

The students in my LGBTQ Digital History class collaborated on a google map of Shewolf’s Directory of Wimmin’s Lands and Lesbian Communities. Working from a scanned copy of the directory, the students mapped the locations and wrote descriptions of all the locations included in the directory. 

map

The students in my Histories of SUNY and CUNY class collaborated on a web exhibit of Stony Brook’s queer and feminist histories from the founding of the university in the late 1950s until the present moment. Using the open source web-publishing platform Omeka, students were asked to collect primary sources related to historical decades and contemporary topics of their choosing.

exhibit

From 2012 until 2019, I served as a coordinator of the Lesbian Hestory Archives, the oldest and largest lesbian historical collection in the world. During this time, I was specifically responsible for the Archives' special collections of personal papers and organizational records. As part of this work, I created a website with descriptions of the collections. As well as descriptions, the website also includes a complete finding aid for the records of New York Women’s Center, a collection that I processed with a grant from the Open Meadows Foundation. 

website 

I worked with Leonore Tiefer on a set of historical projects to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Association for Women in Psychology, an organization of which she is a longtime member. For this project, I created a map of all the meetings and a chart of the members of the implementation collective (or “imps”). I also helped produce a short video about the organization based on interviews conducted with members at the 2017 conference in Philadelphia. 

website | film