Voices
Aquiles Coelho Silva
Nascido e criado na Zona Sul de São Paulo, Aquiles é pesquisador e artista em formação. Formado em economia pela Unicamp (2017), é mestre em Planejamento Urbano IPPUR/UFRJ (2024). Sua prática explora temas como racialidade, espaço urbano, memória, som, poesia e a relação entre terra, espaço e corpo. Aquiles é membro da Coletiva GIRA e do projeto História da Disputa.
Chimee Adịọha
Chimee Adịọha is a PhD student of Rhetoric & Composition in the English Department of the University of California, Irvine. His research focuses on digital rhetorics of social movements, African queer archives, and translingual pedagogy. He is the Co-founder & Editor of Diaspora Africa, an independent media organization using storytelling, research, & digital technology to amplify African migrant voices globally.
Cynthia Nathan
Cynthia Nathan is a multimedia artist whose practice spans steel fabrication, painting, and immersive installation. She holds a BFA in Studio Practices from the University of Missouri–St. Louis (Magna Cum Laude, 2023) and an MFA from the Maine College of Art and Design (2025). Her work explores themes of Hypervisibility, representation, and beauty through rich material contrasts to create speculative environments and Safe Spaces.
Denise Braz
Denise Braz is a Brazilian scholar from Minas Gerais and a PhD candidate at the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS) at the University of Texas at Austin. Her doctoral research examines ancestral Black women’s memory as a political legacy of Black resistance in Latin America, with a focus on community-based forms of survival, care, and collective organization. She holds a degree in Literature from Brazil, where she also taught as a professor, and a Master’s degree in Social Anthropology from the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at the University of Buenos Aires. Her master’s thesis, Black Social Movements in the City of Buenos Aires: Practices and Demands, analyzed the emergence and political demands of Afro-descendant movements in Argentina. Her research engages questions of race, gender, and class in Latin America, focusing on Black social movements, Black feminisms, the African diaspora, modernity, contra-colonial thought, and intersectional approaches to knowledge production.
Lennita
Lennita Oliveira Ruggi is a lecturer in Sociology of Education at the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR - Curitiba, Brazil). She did her Ph.D. on gender equality in higher education in the Centre for Global Women’s Studies in the School of Political Science and Sociology in the University of Galway (Ireland). She is currently a Postdoctoral fellow at Charles University (Prague).
Natália Alves
Natália Alves is a Brazilian researcher in urban studies and an intermedia artist. Her work investigates Afrodiaporic life in urban centers, combining diverse creative fields, including sound art, photography, and performance. She is a PhD candidate in Urban Planning at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, has a master's degree in Architecture and Urbanism, and a bachelor's degree in Social Communication. As a Fulbright Fellow (2024-2025), Natália received a Doctoral Dissertation Research Award to conduct part of her doctoral research in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. As an artist, her recent solo work includes the performance "Zona Zoom Zum" (2025). She is part of a duo with the artist Ricardo Aleixo, co-authoring numerous works in audio, video, and performance, with emphasis on "Qual Brasil? Portuqual?" (Exhibition “Complexo Brasil”, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Portugal, 2026) and "The fish doesn't hold anyone's hand" (35th Bienal de São Paulo, 2023).
Nohora Arrieta Fernández
Nohora Arrieta Fernández is a writer, researcher, and scholar. She is an Assistant Professor of Afro-Latin American studies at UCLA. She has published essays and articles on Latin American literature and visual arts, comics, and the Afro-Latin American Diaspora, and regularly collaborates with art magazines Contemporyand, Artishock, and Terremoto. Her scholarly publications have appeared in Transition, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, in the United States, and in multiple journals in Brazil and Colombia. Her first co-translation project, Semantic of the World: the Poetry of Romulo Bustos Aguirre, was published in 2022.
Onyekachi Ekeogu
Onyekachi Ekeogu, Ph.D., is an adjunct professor of Justice and Social Inquiry in the School of Transformation at Arizona State University and draws inspiration from the threads that connect past and present struggles for liberation as well as from the ways communities carry knowledge, resistance, and hope across generations.
Paula Lezama
Paula Lezama is a doctoral candidate in Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin with a background in economics and sociology. Her research employs a decolonial political economy approach, integrating participatory, mixed methods, and decolonial frameworks to analyze Afrodescendant women’s collective governance, economies of refusal, and community-defined well-being. She also supports large-scale data projects on immigration policy and education in the United States. She is a 2025-2026 American Association of Women Dissertation Fellow and a researcher at the Numbers for Justice Lab.
