John Cameron Mitchell

John directed, wrote and starred in the film Hedwig and the Angry Inch which the New York Times listed as one of the “Top Ten Films of 2001”. For Hedwig, John received the Best Director and Audience Awards at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival and a Golden Globe nomination for “Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy”.  He also won Best Directorial Debut from the National Board of Review, the Gotham Awards and the L.A. Film Critics Association.  He won a 1999 Obie Award for Writing and Performance for the original Off-Broadway staging of Hedwig.

In 2004, along with Gus Van Sant, he executive-produced Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation which won Best Documentary from the National Society of Film Critics, the Independent Spirits and the Gothams as well as the London and L.A. Film Festivals. His 2006 film Shortbus won multiple awards from the Zurich, Athens, and Gijon Film Festivals as well as the Independent Spirits. In 2007 he accepted the “Dorothy Hirshon Award for Cinematic Achievement” from New School University where he taught a residency in film.  He was a fellow of the Sundance Institute and a Sundance Screenwriting Advisor in Peru and Brazil.  He has directed music videos for the bands Bright Eyes and Scissor Sisters. He received the New York State Senate Democrats’ “2004 Special Human Rights Award” from now-Governor David A. Paterson.

Joan Larkin

Joan Larkin’s My Body: New and Selected Poems (Hanging Loose Press) received the Publishing Triangle’s 2008 Audre Lorde Award. David Ulin of the Los Angeles Times has called Larkin’s voice “unsentimental, ruthless and clear-eyed…. This is poetry without pity, in which despair leads not to degradation but to a kind of grace.” Larkin’s previous books include Housework, A Long Sound, Sor Juana’s Love Poems (co-translated with Jaime Manrique), and Cold River, winner of the Lambda Award for poetry.

Larkin co-founded the independent press Out & Out Books as part of the feminist literary explosion of the 1970s and co-edited the groundbreaking anthologies Amazon Poetry and Lesbian Poetry with Elly Bulkin and Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time with Carl Morse. Her anthology A Woman Like That was nominated for Publishing Triangle and Lambda prizes for nonfiction in 2000. Larkin has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

She has a B.A. degree from Swarthmore, an M.A. in English from the University of Arizona, and an M.F.A. in Playwriting from Brooklyn College. She has served on the writing faculties of Brooklyn, Sarah Lawrence, Goddard, and New England Colleges and as Distinguished Visiting Poet at Columbia College Chicago and Wichita State University.

Dean Spade

2006-2008 Williams Institute Law Teaching Fellow, UCLA School of Law
Dean Spade completed his undergraduate studies at Barnard College, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude, and was awarded the Jane S. Gould Prize for Best Women’s Studies Senior Thesis. He is a 2001 Order of the Coif graduate of UCLA School of Law, where he was a member of the UCLA Law Review and an Emil J. Stache Public Interest Law Fellow.

In 2002, Dean founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (www.srlp.org), an innovative law collective focused on gender, racial, and economic justice. SRLP provides free legal help to low-income people and people of color facing gender identity and/or expression discrimination. SRLP also operates on a collective governance model, prioritizing the governance and leadership of trans, intersex, and gender variant people of color.

Dean’s current research interests include the impact of the War on Terror on transgender rights, the bureaucratization of trans identities, and models of non-profit governance in social movements.