Schedule of Events
Molly Jae Vaughan
Molly Jae Vaughan (British, born England, 1977) holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of South Florida in Tampa. Her work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at the Seattle Art Museum and the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art and in group exhibitions at San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, State of Fashion Biennale 2022 (Arnhem, Netherlands), the Block Museum of Art (Evanston, IL), the Henry Art Gallery (Seattle), and the Minnesota Museum of American Art (St. Paul). Vaughan was the 2017 recipient of the Betty Bowen Award and has received grants from Art Matters Foundation, Visual Artists Network, and the Hillsborough Arts Council. In 2018, Vaughan presented a talk at TEDXSEATTLE about her ongoing Project 42, which memorializes transgender murder victims. Vaughan is currently a Senior Associate Professor of Art at Bellevue College and lives and works in Seattle. In 2024, Vaughan was selected to represent Washington state in the triennial exhibition “Women to Watch: New Worlds” at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC.
Sa Whitley
Sa Whitley is an Assistant Professor of Women & Gender Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University and a black queer non-binary artist living in Phoenix. They received a Ph.D. in Gender Studies and an M.A. in African American Studies from UCLA and a Bachelor’s in English from Princeton University. Whitley’s research projects explore black and LGBTQ housing-justice movements, queer financial subjectivities, and the politics of black urban land reclamation and architectural preservation. Their current book manuscript has been supported by the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women and the Dartmouth Society of Fellows. Whitley’s recent scholarly writing is available or forthcoming in TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly and Antipode: A Journal of Radical Geography. Whitley is also an award-winning poet and contributor to the literary arts. They are a Cave Canem Fellow and the winner of the 2024 Indiana Review Poetry Prize. Their recent poems appear or are forthcoming in POETRY Magazine, Ninth Letter, Palette Poetry, and Paperbag. Whitley also participated in the 2023-2024 Poetry & the Senses Fellowship with the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley and the ASU Center for Imagination in the Borderlands.
Robin Maril
Robin Maril is a writer and professor based in Portland, Oregon. She teaches Constitutional Law and Administrative Law at Willamette University. Her work engages questions of democratic integrity and the growing threat of fascism and authoritarian regimes within America. Before teaching, Robin worked in the LGBTQ civil rights movement for nearly a decade. As Associate Legal Director at the Human Rights Campaign, she worked directly with Congress and the Executive Branch on federal programs and policies impacting the LGBTQ community. She also focused extensively on issues impacting the federal judiciary and federal judicial nominations including the U.S. Supreme Court. Robin began her legal career as a Presidential Management Fellow at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. She and her wife have two sons, two dogs, and an unknown number of snails. She is a proud graduate of the University of Oklahoma and Temple University Beasley School of Law. THEFUTUREISQUEERPODCAST.com
Sloane McNulty
Sloane McNulty (PhD American Studies – Rutgers University) is a professor of critical studies and liberal arts at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Their work is centered on assemblages of gender, ecology, and capital, while also intervening in narratives around contemporary aesthetics, media, and animal ethics. They have published articles for Culture Critique, Cyborgology, and Oregon Arts Watch, and are currently working on a series of essays around the production of gender as threat, encompassing scholarship on: the anarchist dynamics of ethical parasitism and anti-work politics, affective regimes of contemporary trans ontology, AI as fascist aesthetic machinery, and the nascent political-economy of "recursive enclosure."
Past Symposium themes have included:
- Art & Social Consciousness (2023)
- DIY: Do-It-Yourself/Do-It-Ourselves (2022)
- Speculative Futures (2021)
- Forms of Care: Building the Worlds We Need (2020)
