Thank you for your interest in the Black Trans Ethical World(un)making Lab. The Lab will live differently, in the form of artist talks and presentations in 2025-2026. The application for the next cohort will be released in Fall 2026.
an experimental, local-national collective of black trans artists, scholars, and activists engaging their moral imagination toward more just worlds
2024-2025 Inaugural Cohort
Charley Burton is a native of Charlottesville VA. His book, telling his life story, The Boy Beneath My Skin, is available on Amazon. It’s a story about a survivor of abuse, addiction, mental illness, gender dysphoria that, in the end, shows his indominable spirit to recover and live a rich life. This may be just one man’s story but, in many ways, it’s a story about us all.
Charley recently founded STEP, the Supporting Trans Elder Project, that supports elder Transmen to continue to thrive as they age. Charley is the owner of Charley Speaks where he conducts speaking engagements and training and, through his story telling and inspirational chat, he involves his audience to better understand what it is like to be a Black Transman living in the south. Charley is a board member of Equality Virginia, and he also created a group called Black Transmen Can Cook, which will create the first cookbook created solely by Transmen. Charley is currently enrolled at Morehouse College, majoring in Business Administration/Public Health.
Joshua K. Reason (they/them) is a transdisciplinary, multimodal scholar-artist from the Bay Area. Their work details Black : Indigenous performing and visual arts in the Americas as rehearsals for freedom beyond the limitations of modernity. Through ethnography, performance studies, cultural studies, and geography, they write and create towards new grammars for sexuality, intimacy, desire, and erotics. Their work has been published in The Black Scholar, The Journal of American Culture, The Journal of Black Sexuality and Relationships, and becoming undisciplined: a zine. Joshua is currently producing Brazil After Dark, a documentary about Black : Indigenous LGBTQIAPN+ artists in North-Northeast Brazil. As a recipient of the inaugural Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship, they traveled to eight different states in the region and interviewed over twenty artists. This project is an ongoing collaboration with Coletivo das Liliths (Collective of Liliths), an LGBTQIA+ theater group that aims to share the stories of those––past and present––at the racial, gender, sexual, and geographic margins of Brazilian society. In addition to their international work, Joshua serves local queer and trans communities of color. Most recently, they became a project lead for the Black, Indigenous, and Trans of Color Histories Lab, a growing collective of scholars, artists, academics, and organizers based in the United States who create programming, publications, and other initiatives focused on trans of color historywork.
SUR(They/He) is a Black/Queer/Trans-Nonbinary practitioner scholar whose work is rooted in reimagining parallels of BDSM and dance grounded in queer afrocentric theoretical framework. Sur’s research is concerned with the amount of pain that movement artists are subjected to in dance spaces, challenging the ethics of consent, power dynamics and care in dance, memory of black theatrics in regard to spectacle of pain and the power of visible/invisible bruises that create discourse amongst the black moving bodies. Sur received their B.A and M.A in Communication Studies from California State University, Northridge. Sur also served as a movement coach, co-director, and assistant director for CSUN Performance Ensemble.
Jari Bradley (they/them) is a Black transmasculine poet, scholar, and a San Francisco native. They are the recipient of an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellowship, an Inprint Donald Barthelme Poetry Prize recipient, and a Cave Canem fellow. Their poems have been published in Callaloo, Virginia Quarterly Review, Academy of American Poets (Poem-A Day), and elsewhere. They are currently a PhD candidate in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Houston and an online Poetry Editor for the Gulf Coast Journal.
NOVA CYPRESS BLACK (dey/dem/NOVA) writes deir name in all caps as a reminder to take up space as a disabled Black gender-expansive lighthouse. NOVA was a Staff Writer on season 3 of Showtime’s The L Word: Generation Q. Dey were also a Writing Fellow in Film Independent’s 2024 Project Involve & a TV Writing Fellow in Lambda Literary's 2024 Writers Retreat; Outfest's 2021 Screenwriting Lab; & Lena Waithe's 2021 Hillman Grad Mentorship Lab. NOVA was also 1 of 7 trans writers who made the 2022 GLAAD List, with their sci-fi TV pilot BLACKSEED. Dey’ve written three produced shorts–SWEET TOOTH (premiered on RevoltTV’s Short & Fresh series, August 2022); A WEST SIDE LOVE STORY (premiering at the 2025 Pan African Film Festival); DEEP DISH DIMPLES (premiering at the 2025 Slamdance Film Festival). NOVA's solo directorial debut, (dey/dem): a choreo-doc, has become required viewing in courses at Spelman College; University of California, Riverside; & is preserved in University of California, Los Angeles’s Film & Television Archive. The experimental documentary has been a recipient of grants from Southern Documentary Fund; National Black Arts; Arts & Entertainment Atlanta; & Idea Capital & won Cycle 2, Season 2 of ATLFilmParty during deir time as Sequoia Ascension’s 2023 Artist-in-Residence. This nomadic Libra was a recipient of a 2024 Sony Pictures Entertainment Fellowship & is currently a Circle Member of the Rideback RISE Fellowship & an inaugural participant in the 2024-5 Black Trans Ethical World(un)making Lab. www.novacypressblack.com
Justin Clarel (they/them) is a Black queer writer, educator, and forever theatre kid creating and uplifting vibrant stories for a better world. Justin has directed, written, and produced original theatre projects highlighting Black stories, including settle down, Rage to Heal, and Queer Cheer: A Winter Holigay Special. Justin's works for stage and screen have been showcased by InterAct Theatre Company, The Strides Collective, OUTsider Festival, and more. Their sketch comedy team The Rhubarbs sold out shows in Philadelphia and (gently) crushed competitions.
Justin’s commitment to COVID safety and pandemic solidarity grounds their art and organizing work. To disrupt the mainstream myth that "COVID is over," they write characters facing inaccessibility and isolation while trying to protect themselves and others from this deadly and disabling virus. In the early pandemic years, they produced several virtual showcases featuring Black LGBTQ artists. In 2023, they directed a mask–required reading of Jackie Torres' How to Grow Vegetables and Other Poems for the End of the World for the Dixon Place HOT Festival. Justin's newsletter, so very virtual, features online opportunities, virtual events, and helpful resources for these pandemic times.
Justin is a 2023 Genderfunk Philly Resident Artist, a 2022 Hurston/Wright Summer Screenwriting Fellow, a two-time VONA Alum in Comedy and Screenwriting, and a 2020 Leeway Foundation Art and Change Grantee. They hold an AB in Sociology from Princeton University and currently study Writing for the Screen at Antioch University Los Angeles. Keep up with their adventures at theeclarel.com and @theeclarel.
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The Black Trans Ethical World(un)making Lab consists of three virtual workshops and visioning + practice sessions over the course of the year that serve as opportunities for community-building and for co-working on each participants’ project/thought/provocation/invitation toward black trans ethical world(un)making. The Lab will run October 2024-May 2025.
The three workshops address the following themes: 1) community care and collective healing, 2) moral imagination, and 3) (un)making ethical worlds. The BTEW Lab is a space grounded in theory and practice toward countering the disembodied, anti-black and anti-trans, individualist ways of being and becoming often forwarded in many scholarly, artistic, and activist spaces to deepen into black trans epistemologies that value black trans wholeness, feeling, collaboration, and mutuality.
The aim of this Lab is mutual edification among activists, artists, and academics; broadening conceptions of the religious/spiritual/sacred/ethical work that is done to heal communities and bring about the liberative; disrupting notions of transness as antithetical to the religious/spiritual/sacred/ethical; and creating space for attending to both the joys of and affronts to black trans life/lives/living/aliveness.
The Black Trans Ethical World(un)making Lab is made possible by black trans imagination and co-sponsored by the Department of Black Study at the University of California, Riverside and the University of California Humanities Research Institute.
More Details
Eligibility
The Lab is co-created with artists, activists, and/or scholars who are black trans and working on a project that allows them to reflect with others on the theme of ethical world(un)making. It is open to:
1. Artists
3+ years of practice
2. Scholars
MFA and post-doctoral scholars in the humanities
Early or mid-career
Institutionally affiliated and independent scholars welcome
3. Activists
Connected and active in their local community
3+ years of practice
Benefits
The Lab offers:
Community: The Lab is a space for practice, collaboration, co-dreaming, thinking, feeling, and strategizing with persons committed to living into black trans thriving and more liberative worlds. The Lab also provides opportunity for co-working, workshopping ideas, and potential for programming in partnership with the Department of Black Study at University of California, Riverside.
Project stipend: Participants will receive a project stipend of $800. If University of California faculty, the stipend will be $500 in research funds.
Experimental & Reflective Space: The Lab is not outcome focused but invested in the process of collective reflection and creating. It is grounded in imaginative, liberative praxes and the magic that occurs when this visioning and practicing is done together. The Visioning + Practice Sessions serve this aim.
Expectations
The 2024-2025 cohort of the lab will meet October 2024-May 2025. The exact dates will be determined after participants are selected. Participants must attend each of the three virtual meetings that will be approximately three hours long. In part, these meetings will be opportunities to engage the workshop themes [ a) community care and collective healing, b) moral imagination, and c) (un)making ethical worlds)and to be in dialogue regarding the participant’s creative project/process.
Access application here.
