IRN Coordinator, Selly Thiam is a journalist and oral historian whose work has appeared on NPR, PBS and in Colorlines Magazine. Selly was formerly the producer for the StoryCorps Griot Initiative which gathered over 2000 interviews from African-Americans across the United States. She is the founder of None on Record (NOR), a transnational audiobased oral history project that collects the stories of Africans that identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer from the African continent and in diasporic communities.
Development Director, Effie MacLachlan is a graduate of the CUNY doctoral program in Political Science. Over the last year, she has served as Deputy Director and Development Director for the ALL CITY Foundation, a communitybased arts and health collaborative. Dr. MacLachlan has led research projects and fundraising initiatives for several public policy and international affairs research institutes at the Graduate Center. She was appointed a CUNY Writing Fellow from 1999-2001, and during that time she wrote several writing handbooks for faculty use. She co-authored a statistical analysis of The Economic Status of Working Women in New York (2007) and contributed to the Encyclopedia of the United Nations and International Agreements (2003). For her own scholarship on the human rights of immigrant women in the European Union she received the Athena Pollis Fellowship in Human Rights and the John H. E. Fried Memorial Fellowship in International Human Rights.
B. A. Alzaid is the Events and Outreach Coordinator and edits CLAGSNews. An academic, activist and artist—Alzaid explores gender and sexuality in the Middle East and its diaspora, including the formation of LGBT activist communities, the transmission of affect in digital media, and violence as a creative force. Alzaid’s art and activist work ranges from film and performance (including a documentary exploring South African artist Pieter Dirk-Uys’s transgressive use of camp to critique Apartheid) to community based initiatives on wealth redistribution and food justice.
Lolan Sevilla is the Membership and Fellowships Coordinator at CLAGS. She is a cultural worker who roots her art in community, study and practice. Lolan also works as a community organizer with Filipinas for Rights & Empowerment (www.firenyc. org) which is a member organization of both GABRIELA USA and BAYANUSA ( http://bayanusa.org/). She is the author of Translating New Brown (Pinayjive Press, 2005), a collection of poetry and short stories, and co-editor of Walang Hiya…Literature Taking Risks Toward Liberatory Practice (Arkipelago Publishing, 2010).