Conference Co-Chair
 | | Jessica Eve Humphrey is a peripatetic Femme who currently lives in Chicago on weekends, and travels around the country on assignment for the Labor Movement during the week. When she has the opportunity, Jessica is a radical homebody who likes to knit things, read things, cook things, and recharge her batteries with radical queer community. Fat, femme and fond of frosting, she thinks alliteration is sexy and slant rhyme is fantastic. Truly geeky, Jessica believes in working hard to make all our lives better, political activism that's rooted in both ideals and pragmatism, multi-issue/multi-identity feminism, and the bliss of perfectly-baked baked goods.<email> |
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| Conference Co-Chair
 | | Christine De La Rosa is a transplanted Tejana living the Bay Area who has been creating spaces for the LGBT community for over twelve years both online and in real life. One of the founding members of the Femme Collective, co-founder of Movement Productions which produces BLISS – An Oasis for Women of Color in the Desert, WETbar, Good Times, among other events, co-host of Real Talk with Kiki and Miz Chris on KPFA radio, founder of MizChris.com and the Yay! Area Events Newsletter and owner of Butch-Femme.com, Christine is committed to creating intentional space for Women of Color within a larger lesbian community context. Her passion is bringing together diverse groups of women to mix, mingle, talk, argue, engage, converse and generally bring about change through conferences, events, gatherings and salons where ideas are sparked and exchanged. She believes that through this dialogue, we can create change, together.<email> You can also reach Christine at http://www.mizchris.com/ |
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| | | | | | Executive Committee Member
 | Mz. Amy Adams is a community activist and lover of women, trying to enhance the lives of women and family with love & positivity. With the mission of creating harmonious communities for women by women, she also finds love rockin the mic. She spits poems with ferocious diva attitude. Performing around the Bay Area and beyond for the past 7 years. SheSpeaks, Eclectic, Love Jones, Coochielicious, LIP, Butta, 2007 APIWTC 20th annual Lunar Banquet, Dorsey’s Locker, FRESH, Winner of 2008 Talent Show , 2009 SF Pride Women’s Stage, and has acted in the Fourth Annual DykeDrama Festival, Dangerous Curves: “The Femme Show” , and several other plays with the Lunasea Theater. Mz. Amy was also the organizer for the 2004 Oakland Poetry Slam, Organizer for the 2006 Shespeaks fundraiser for Sistahs Steppin In Pride. 2008 organizer for the MO’ Butta Weekend, 2008 Volunteer Coordinator for the Soul of Pride Stage @SF Pride, 2008 Coordinator for the Butch-Femme Bash, 2009 Volunteer Coordinator for the SF Pride Women’s Stage. <email> | | | | |
Performance Co-Chair
| | The Lady Ms. Vagina Jenkins is more than "Atlanta's Best Burlesque Dancer" as named by Creative Loafing magazine, she's more than one of Go! Magazine's "Top 100 Lesbians", she's more than SOVO's magazine's most creative "up and coming activist." The Lady Ms. Vagina Jenkins is also a noted philanthropist. As the CEO and Founder of the "No Butch Left Behind" program she's been housing (and bedding) impressionable young fellagirlies since 2003. Give until it hurts, that's Vagina Jenkins' motto. If you'd like to learn more about her efforts in your town, check www.VaginaJenkins.com for more details! <email> |
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Performance Co-Chair
 | | Currently celebrating 30 years as a tap dancer, Krista Smith aka Kentucky Fried Woman (KFW) has been performing in and producing queer cabaret shows since 2000. She was a member of the Disposable Boy Toys in Santa Barbara, CA and founded the Queen Bees in Seattle, WA in 2002. Since residing in Oakland she has founded three performance groups, ButchBallet, ButchTap & Titland and has also performed and produced as a solo artist and with other Bay Area queer performance artists, including playing the part of Hermoine Granger in Hogwarts Express: The Musical. Since living in the San Francisco Bay Area she has produced the 2006 Femme Conference Saturday Evening Cabaret, Project Rungay, After School Special I, II & III, The Lewis & Clark College 2008 Gender Symposium Entertainment, the Wham! Tribute Show, Rally the Troupes IV in the 2008 National Queer Arts Festival, the 2008 Butch-Femme.com Bash Slut Night, the 2008 International Drag KingCommunity Extravaganza Brunch, Flabulous! and a monthly queer cabaret that takes place in Oakland called the Kentucky Fried Woman show. KFW also facilitates workshops around the US and Canada on the intersections of bodies and identities. She is one of the femmes featured in the book: Femmes of Power where her essay discusses the intersections of her fat, femme and queer identities. She has been on the steering committee of the FemmeCollective since 2005 and is thrilled to be on board for Femme2010: No Restrictions. <email> |
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Amie LeeKing, www.handpickedlovlies.com
| Celeste Chan aka Chan Dynasty is a queer API multimedia artist, performer, activist, and arts organizer. She is inspired by drag queens, Chinese opera, radical queer people of color cabaret/burlesque, and new media. She has performed and screened her work at National Queer Arts Festival, Mangos with Chili shows, Queer Women of Color Film Fest, TrannyFest, SF in Exile, and other art venues. She's also organized with Shifting Narratives film collective (2008-present), Homoagogo (2002), and she's a proud Board Member of Community United Against Violence ( cuav.org). | | | | Performance Committee | amanda harris is a queer-southern-feminist-femme living in brooklyn but always longing for her southern soil. she is the madame of country glam for femme family nyc and believes in carrying our roots and telling our stories wherever we go.
| | | | Performance Committee | With the goal of making you laugh infused into every piece she creates Pidgeon Von Tramp brings humor into everyday events brought to the stage. Of course she may also try to sneak in a little taboo and a smidge of thought provoking politics. Pidge currently produces quarterly shows with Pidgeon Coop Productions in Seattle. | | | | Performance Committee
 | Ms. Cherry Galette: Born into a family of migrant music makers, Ms. Cherry Galette is a Moroccan and Chicana interdisciplinary movement artist fusing dance, burlesque, text, theater and more to create post-colonial fairy tales of modern resistance that celebrate queer desires, histories, survivals, migrations, and revolutions. Cherry has captivated, delighted, roused and stunned audiences as a solo artist in renowned, alternative, and underground theaters, festivals, cabarets, clubs, and varied stages across North America. She has danced and performed with some of the Bay Area's most noted world dance ensembles including MaraReggae, The Hot Pink Feathers, and the legendary Shabnam. Cherry’s performance is a collision of cultural crossroads, era, tradition, and place, evoking elements of the cosmopolitan cabarets of the golden age of Middle Eastern dance, the legacy of movement passed down in women’s kitchens and salons, and the energy, joy, and enthusiasm of collective street dance. Drawing on strong dance technique of the Arabic and Latin diaspora, and with a burlesque repertoire ranging from classic glamour to comedy to the ethereal, she has earned recognition for expanding the genre of burlesque to explore narratives of race, power, empire, and queer bodies in diaspora, and is known for presenting genre pushing work based in sultry, sacred, and profane fusions of traditional dance forms with story, burlesque and ultra-gay cabaret. Over the past 5 years, Cherry has produced and curated more than 60 productions for audiences across North America as both solo producer, and as Co-Director of Mangos With Chili. | | | | |
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Programming Chair
 | | Dr. Kathe Young is a queer Femme feminist and one of the founding members of the Femme Collective. She is a Clinical Psychologist and owner of Affirming Alternatives Psychological Services, a practice that specializes in treating trauma and Chicago's queer community. She can be found blogging about all things trauma related at Treating Trauma in Chicago. Her professional interests include trauma, EMDR and mindfulness. She is recently intrigued by the application of social media to mental health treatment and education. Her personal interests include processing things endlessly, hiking, feminism, vegetarian cooking and pugs. <email> |
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Sophie Spinelle of Shameless Photography
| Taueret Manu is a fatshion shopgrrl, activist, and artist. Her femme roots are in the elevated subway tracks, man-made jungle zoos, queer topless beaches, and gentrified piers of New York City. Her hands and heart are always full of sequins, trouble, and ferocity (tools, all of them). She loves the divine, pitbulls, friction, hibiscus juice, sexual currency, poetry, rioting, and her femmesisterfriends. She dislikes White Santa/White Jesus/White Male God, the prison industrial complex, and the NYPD. She is also the co-editor of the radical fat style zine Glutton for Fatshion, an organizer with the Femme Family NYC, and a proud Femme Shark. | | | | Programming Committee
 | Sophie Spinelle is a high femme photographer and poet living and working in Brooklyn, New York. She is founder of Shameless Photography (www.shamelessphoto.com), a feminist pinup photography business that works to turn beauty standards upside down and reclaim stilettos, rhinestones, and crinolines for people of all colors, sizes, shapes, and abilities. She is an organizer for Femme Family NYC and an incorrigible troublemaker with Femme Menace Action Club. She is also a tree hugger, cake batter eater, linguistic anthropologist, shower opera singer, scrabble fiend, and really good friend. | | | | Programming Committee | Aja Jones Aguirre is a born and raised San Francisco femme, feminist, wife and mother. When she's not working as Senior Editor for Drink Me Magazine or volunteering for IMPACT Bay Area Self-Defense, Aja gives the world a cheeky peek into one lesbian's closet at her style blog, Fit For A Femme, nominated for the prestigious Lezzy Award for two years running. She's also deejayed at lesbian and queer parties like Catfight, Hot Pants and Shadowplay, including the popular Shadowplay stage at SF Pride. Some of her proudest moments include fighting violence against women with the Purple Berets, surviving natural childbirth with a healthy 8-lb. baby girl, a one-time appearance in Curve Magazine, an established non-fear of public speaking, and being legally wed to her dapper wife, Miriam. This is her first year as a member of the Femme Collective, and she hopes to be so inspired that the awkward standoff with her unfinished novel can at last come to an end(ing). | | | | Programming Committee | Christina is a fabulous, fierce femme and feminist extraordinaire with a serious heart on for political action and community organization and an unmitigated desire for beautiful shoes. She currently lives in Oakland, California by way of Sacramento, CA; Pittsburgh, PA and Chicago, IL. In her downtime, Christina enjoys time with her amazing family, human and canine alike, and dancing like no one... and everyone... is watching. | | | | Programming Committee
 | Cassandra Falby is a West Indian-American femme who has been 'that way' since the days of Underoos. Currently, she is a graduate student working toward her M.S. in Counseling with the goal of becoming a therapist. Cassandra is a member of The Art of Living Black (TAOLB), a collective of San Francisco Bay Area artists of African descent. For three years running, she has co-curated a satellite exhibit through TAOLB which is held annually at Mills College in Oakland, California. Her commitment to gender freedom and racial awareness includes her work as the Logistics Chair for Femme 2006, her participation in the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project (QWOCMAP), and her love of performance. She is one of the founding members of the Femme Collective. | | | | |
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Registration Chair
 | | Marisa A. Klages is a fat queer femme from NYC. She earned her PhD in 2007 from West Virginia Univeristy and specialized in medieval mysticism. Marisa teaches writing and literature at LaGuardia Community College in NYC. An avid cyclist, you can find her blog at Fat Grrl Rides.<email> |
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| Erin McDowell is a box office and special events manager who loves checking in hot girls ;) She is a life-long competitive track runner planning on competing in the Gay Games VIII in Cologne, Germany and reclaiming her title as 'the world's fastest lesbian.' She is also a new bird on the Sac City Roller girls derby team and is working on her Master's at SFSU in Recreation. This fierce femme is looking forward to working with all of you! | |
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Media Co-Chair
 | | Cherry Poppins (aka Allison Stelly) is a queer femme artist, performer, writer, and organizer. She just moved to the Bay Area from Austin, TX, where she spent 7 years Making Things Happen: producing a drag troupe, co-founding a radical queerleading squad, launching the Austin chapter of the Femme Mafia, building community, making zines, and organizing events (no doubt she'll stay busy in the Bay, as well!). She crafts like it's going out of style, journals obsessively, and leaves a trail of glitter in her wake. <email> |
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Media Co-Chair
Photo by Ally Picard | | Hadassah 'Damien' Hill is a Brooklyn-based queer femme, liberationist artist, writer, creative, and activist who performs as Axon D’Luxe. Her work focuses on celebrating extremes of femininity; feminist / queer archiving and storytelling, and on building and skillsharing a new framework to both analyze and enjoy life from. D'Luxe is co-founder of New York's Femme Family [femmefamily.com], a queer femme cultural community; she's the co-creative director of the all-femme Hart Collective [hartcollective.com]; and she Art Directed the award-winning $pread Magazine [spreadmagazine.org] for three years. A repatriated expat by way of Toronto, DIY tech geek and communications designer [heelsonwheelsdesign.com], and working-class gone hustling-class high femme fatale, Damien loves rhinestones and anything dramatic on wheels. Download tracks, read stories and her how-to blog: www.axondluxe.com <email> |
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Sophie Spinelle of Shamless Photograph | Bevin Branlandingham is the Host and Producer of FemmeCast: The Queer Fat Femme Podcast Guide to Life. She is a flamboyant femmecee, queer high femme, writer, drag king, burlesque and comedy performer. She is Co-Head Madam of the Femme Family, the New York Chapter of the Femme Mafia, and on the steering committee for the Fat and Queer conference. In 2008 Bevin received a Commendation from the Mayor of Jersey City for her work with the LGBT community. Her writing has been published in numerous periodicals and she has performed throughout North America. Her mission is to make the world a safe place for people to love themselves, regardless of their differences. Her website (including blog, calendar of events and workshops) is found at QueerFatFemme.Com. | | | | Media Committee
 | Meredith Fenton is a long-time Bay Area activist, performer and fairy princess. By day, she is the Director of Communication Strategy at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, where she leverages media, communications and Web 2.0 for economic and racial justice social change. She performs drag and burlesque under the names Starr 69 and Corky St. Flair and has been a part of such beloved groups as Hogwarts Express: the Musical, Titland, The Transformers, Burlesque-Esque, and Sparkle Motion. Meredith worked as the National Program Director of COLAGE for over 7 years, has years of experience organizing with radical Jews, and has appeared in media outlets from the New York Times to the Advocate. She is an avid reader, an aspiring urban gardener, and a lover of musicals, cheese, glitter and Muppets. | | | | Media Committee
| Haley Koch is a queer femme-inist performance artist and trouble maker whose current work could be described as a sparkly pastiche of anarchist politics, queer theory, stilettos, poetry, and queer archives. She believes in the power of femme magic and rage to destroy, create, and get shit done. If you want to exchange rants, lipstick smudges, or sordid plots, holler at her: haleykoch(at)gmail(dot)com. | | | | |
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Logistics Co-Chair
| | Jodi Bon Jodi (aka Joe D. Vice / Jodi Kansagor) was a member of DK PDX, Portland OR's fagtastic drag troupe until early 2006 when the troupe disbanded. Since then she has focused on other projects, including receiving her MBA from Portland State University, co-founding Pants Off Productions, a radical queer event production company, and also co-founding The Untrained, I Dance Company. JBJ spends most of her time figuring out how to survive in the world without a full time job while also providing fun activities for her community. Jodi Bon Jodi loves expensive cosmetics, cheap beer and condescension. <email> |
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Logistics Committee  | Aster Wolfe is a genderqueer mythical creature who could be found until recently in the home terrain of Portland, OR. Here you might have run across him laying down some smut for the Dirty Queer open mic at In Other Words. Or helping reinvent queer performance by strutting all matter of sexy and thought-provoking stuff on the Pants Off Productions stage, both solo as Billy Coyote and with Beefcake Burlesque. Aster has called queer, femme, trans, genderf***ing, worker's-rights-rabble-rousing community home for a long time and is committed to the work of co-creating safe space and challenging ourselves and the world through performance, the written word and co-conspiring. Recently transplanted to Oakland, CA, Aster is nesting and making magic and is open to newly local conspirators and friends. | | | | |
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| Accessibility and Awareness Chair
 | | jennifer valles is sassy, classy and femme (among other things). founder, performer, activist, inciter, creator, mediator, dreamer and soup maker, she has extensive experience in performance activism, public education and community organizing. her paid and unpaid work has focused largely on queer liberation, gender-based violence, reproductive justice, and the sex trade. Currently funemployed, jennifer spends her time reveling in her return to Chicago, the city that holds her heart: plotting future projects, studying to be a master gardener, watching rouge rugrats, and generally running amok. her likes include dismantling privilege & oppression, the lost truths of both/and, and locating the community and power in the space in-between. she also enjoys soft and stinky cheese, whiskey and dancing, although not necessarily all together or in that order. <email> |
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| Kaytee Duskin is a queer femme living in Denver, CO, who grew up in Philly and spent some time in Grrrlington, VT. After co-facilitating the femme caucus at the University of Vermont's Translating Identity Conference for the last two years, she hopes she's ready for the big leagues of femme conferencing. Right now she's working at an environmental education non-profit, crocheting fancy beer cozies, and listening to a lot of Kate Bush. Kaytee enjoys craftivism, farmers markets, books about labor unions, creme brulee, and playing the banjo. | | | | Accessibility and Awareness Committee
 | Dulce is a fierce Queer Xicana born in Mexico City and raised in East Los Angeles who has evolved from a high risk youth to an outspoken community activist and organizer. Blending her book smarts with her street smarts, she has passionately served underrepresented and undeserved communities since the age of 19, while never forgetting her roots. As a sexual health educator she advocates for self-empowerment though education that is fun, non-judgmental, and accessible to her audience regardless of their age, gender, sexual orientation, race or ability status. When not talking about sexual communication and consent you can find her at your nearest San Francisco dance floor... she'll be the lady with the hot red lipstick and matching heels dancing Salsa! | |
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Film Chair
Sophie Spinelle of Shamless Photography | | Sarah Deragon is an San Francisco based glitter femme originally from Denver, Colorado. Sarah has a BA in Literature and an MA in Social and Cultural Anthropology and currently works for Frameline, the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival. Sarah was the co-chair of queer women's programming at the San Francisco LGBT Community Center for two years and won Volunteer of the Year for the city of San Francisco in 2008. One of her main focuses is taking the time to create space(s) for exploration around racism and white privilege to launch new anti-racist activism/practices. She occasionally works as a self-defense teacher and maintains a store on Etsy.com, where she sells her fabulous hair accessories. She loves to bake her infamous chocolate mayonnaise cupcakes, play with her pit bull mix, Pork Chop, and do yoga in the early morning hours. <email> |
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| | | Film Committee | Jae Sevelius was born in a trailer park in Opelika, Alabama, was raised in Miami, Florida, and arrived in the Bay Area by way of Gainesville, St. Louis, and Eugene, Oregon. Jae has a PhD in Clinical Psychology and is currently an Assistant Professor of Medicine at University of California, San Francisco. During her clinical internship, Jae discovered she has a distaste for diagnosing people and opted instead to devote her life to research and advocacy for transgender health care. In 2007, she helped found the Center of Excellence for Transgender Health at UCSF (www.transhealth.ucsf.edu). As a genderqueer femme drag king, Jae often finds other people's well-intentioned comments about her gender disorienting. As drag king Jay Walker, he enjoys excessive glitter, fagtastic choreography, well-packed hot pants, and inappropriate duets with his husbutch Delicio Del Toro. | | | | |
Fundraising Chair
| | Jessica Giusti is a queer, fat femme living in Minneapolis, but with her roots firmly planted in the Garden State where she was born and raised. She is a fifth year Ph.D. candidate in gender studies focusing on feminist and queer theories and their intersections with new media, performance, and fat studies. When she’s not working on her dissertation research on the neo-burlesque movement, Jessica keeps busy as the editor of the forthcoming first fat, queer anthology, Spilling Over. In her spare time, she enjoys thinking of ways to merge her academic dreams with her activist heart, teaching butches how to slow dance, and attending cake decorating classes with Midwestern soccer moms. <email> |
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| | | | Fundraising Committee | Moonyean is a life-long lover of books. A California native, she is happy to be living there again after a 16-year break in Arizona where she earned an English degree and owned a feminist bookstore. She lives in northern California with Lakke, her spouse, and Kona, a yellow Lab. She has been published in Hitched! Wedding Stories from San Francisco City Hall and in Visible: A Femmethology. | | | | Fundraising Committee | A Queen of the Fire Tassels and Satans Angel’s Own Protégé. Straight outta the mouth of Hell is Lady Monster – burlesque, fire tassels, go-go dancer, model, actress, writer, recording artist, event producer and radio disc jockey – plus-sized and passionate! | | | | Fundraising Committee | Lindsey Shively is a femme anarchist organizer in the East Bay. Recently she has been working with Midnight Special Legal Collective, Unsettling Minnesota, and Black Mesa Indigenous Support, and is excited to get back to her roots in queer organizing with the Femme Conference. She is passionate about building multi-generational
radical communities, dismantling heteropatriarchy, and getting other white people to talk about colonization. When not busy smashing the
state, Lindsey enjoys painting her toenails and dancing in her underwear to Dolly Parton songs. | | | | Fundraising Committee | Alysia Angel is a feral mix of Scottish and Lakota Sioux and a native Texan. Alysia a fine whiskey sipper, a female jack tripper, a constellation catcher, a feminist, a lover, a logophile and a high
femme living out of pink Samsonite suitcases. When not courting her San Francisco dreamboat, Karlyn Lotney aka Fairy Butch, she is writing
on scraps of paper on her thigh in bathroom stalls, publishing and touring with a series of five chapbooks entitled "What I Do When You're Not Looking", facilitating body positive workshops and
pretending to be a performer. If asked about where her favorite spot to rest, it would be on her knees. If asked what the most important part of living is, it would be for love. Alysia flags sham-ow on the
left.
http://alysiaangel.blogspot.com/ | |
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Volunteer Co-Chair
 | | Becky Smith is a queer, fat, femme feminist who works for reproductive rights in the non-profit industrial complex by day and inhabits the queer underbelly of Minneapolis by night. <email> |
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Volunteer Co-Chair | | Jessica is a superqueer bearded-lady hard femme, living in Minneapolis, Minnesota for 2 years and 2 months longer than she ever expected. For money, Jessica makes mochas and takes minutes. For love, Jessica dances, brunches, recruits volunqueers, tries to make change in systems and spaces with and for trans and queer young folks, and works on her collective process skills as a anti-Zionist Jew Quaker sex fiend. |
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Transition Chair
 | | Katie Spencer is a queer, feminist, fat, femme in her second go-round working with the femme collective. She has lived and loved in every midwestern state and loves a cold glass of pop and a good hot dish. Strongly invested in building femme community, she values femme friendship and processing feelings as well as long discussions about dismantling the white supremicist heteropatriarchy. She works as a sex and gender therapist by day and a strong proponent of glitter and great mascara by night. Her work as the transition coordinator for this year's conference is focused on establishing the longevity of the conference itself and reaching out to the vast queer femme community to keep the femme collective going strong and continuing its fierce and fabulous traditions. <email> |