2021 Voqal Fellows

Aurum Linh (they/them)  is the Creatrix* of Atlas Lab with extensive experience working in software development at companies like Adobe, IDEO CoLab, and Internet Archive. Aurum sees technology as a tool that cannot be separated from the social and political context in which it is designed, developed, and deployed. They firmly believe that how machines make decisions is a human rights issue – because biased people do not make neutral technology.

Lihn’s project, the Algorithmic Injustice Event Series, focuses on the voices of those whose lives have been affected by algorithmic decision-making to connect them with folks working within the law sector to challenge its use.

Christina Dawkins (she/her) has spent her career advancing human rights. She founded A4Abolitionist, a social justice consultancy to advise artists and educators advancing justice for the most vulnerable populations, and the Abolition Project, an organization that produces collaborative art and education projects to combat modern-day slavery.

Dawkins specializes in human trafficking, punitive incarceration, and immigrant detention. Dawkins has 10+ years of experience in higher education, developing programs, teaching courses, and advising students. She became the founding Program Manager of the Justice-in-Education and Public Humanities Initiatives, in addition to founding the Lang Prison Initiative, the first in-person college program at Metropolitan Correctional Center in NYC.

Dawkins honed her program design skills at institutions such as Columbia University and The New School, designing and implementing social justice projects. She developed curricula and workshops for Creative Time, the Oxford Consortium for Human Rights, Harvard University, Brown University, and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, to name a few. She holds an M.A. in Human Rights Studies from Columbia University and a B.A. in Communications from Northwestern University.

Dawkins’s project, Mapping Modern-day Slavery, addresses the societal problem of modern-day slavery in the United States that takes the form of human trafficking, punitive incarceration, and immigrant detention.

Jazmin Martinez (they/them) draws on the strength, energy, resilience, love, and support of those that sustain them and their lineage. They come from a lineage of campesinos who for decades worked and lived off the land in Mexico.

Martinez’s project, Land in the Hands of BIPOC Farmers, seeks to put land back in the hands of BIPOC farmers as a means of survival, especially during this climate crisis, and as a strategy for collective change that dismantles the current systems of oppression and violence.

Jeannia Fu (they/them) works with incarcerated community members to envision and build abolitionist organizing.

Fu’s project, The Cooperative, is the economic justice arm of the Prison Abolition Community. It is activating a collective of incarcerated people in Connecticut organizing for abolition and join abolitionist organizing to community-led pathways for economic liberation.

Jonathan Lykes (he/they/she) is a Black queer artist, activist, and academic. His interdisciplinary approach to art, activism, and anti-oppression work, merges policy change, artistic expression, and activism. Combining these forms of social transformation—and harnessing their synergy — Jonathan works to create awareness, promote personal healing, surmount institutional barriers, and generate systemic change.

Lykes’ current position as Founder/Executive Director of Liberation House merges his multidisciplinary artistic background with public policy reform, community engagement and systems change work to teach liberation praxis by pushing the revolutionary edge of radical transformative movement work.

Lykes is also the Director of Policy and Programs for Black Youth Project/GenForward Survey. Lykes is also a founding member of Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100), a movement of young adults using a Black Queer Feminist lens to advocate for community and institutional change. Through BYP100, Jonathan curated a freedom song and chant album, The Black Joy Experience, helping to teach holistic energy through the Black radical tradition.

He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago, where he also received his master’s degree from the School for Social Service Administration.

Lykes’ project, KBCAN taps into the radical imagination of the House|Ballroom community and dreams up a world that keeps its members safe as it expands economic opportunity and harnesses the power of queer/trans culture, storytelling, and ritual that allows the community to thrive.

Shani Smith (she/her) inspires collective action and is a Non-Violent Direct Action (NVDA) trainer for Beautiful Trouble. She worked as a Community Outreach Organizer for Service Employees International Union Healthcare in Illinois for four years. Smith has studied NVDA for the past 12 years and was mentored and trained by Civil Rights Leader Rev. James Lawson. Smith also enjoys the mentorship of Mary E. King, Lisa Fithian, Jaquie Algee, and Nadine Bloch; currently, an emerging voice for women of faith and color in Chicago.

Smith has played key roles in both local and national social justice campaigns including Occupy Wall Street (New York), Democracy Spring (Washington, D.C.), and Movement for Black Lives Against Racial Policing (Chicago). She also led a mass demonstration to shut down the Magnificent Mile in Chicago for the Civilian Police Accountability Council after the shooting of Laquan McDonald.

For two years, Smith served as the Non-Violent Direct Action Trainer and Safety Coordinator for Women’s March Chicago where she safely guided a mass demonstration of more than a quarter of a million (250,000) people in 2017 and 350,000 people in 2018 without incident.

Smith has also been acknowledged for driving direct action and civil disobedience for the Climate March Chicago, and the Tax March on Chicago (Chicken Don), served as a Non-Violent Direct Action Trainer for Climate March, May Day Demonstrations, and the Science March, and acted as Chicago Police Liaison for shutting down the Illinois Capital in Springfield in 2015 and the Chicago Board of Trade in 2016.

Smith has worked with Lisa Fithian as a lead trainer and CD Strategist for the Occupy Wall Street action aimed at delaying ringing the bell on New York Stock Exchange. She also provided jail support after the successful arrest of 242 resisters during the 2011 Wall Street Actions.

Molly Benitez (they/them) is an educator, organizer, and activist based in Tacoma Wa., the unceded territory of the Puyallup and Coast Salish people. A current Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland and former welder, Benitez took a break from the shopfloor to learn more about the experiences of LGBTQ+ and QTBIPoC trades workers. In 2018 Benitez co-founded the Seattle-based Reckoning Trades Project which educates and organizes with LGBTQ+ and QTBIPoC trades workers from a community-based framework. Benitez is a 2019 AAUW American Fellow and currently sits on the board of the National LGBTQ Worker’s Center.

Benitez’s academic work is founded on Black Feminist Ideologies and Queer of Color Critique and is dedicated to anti-racist and decolonial teaching and learning. Benitez dissertation, Becoming Your Labor: Identity Production and the ‘Affects of Labor’, weaves together these foundations along with theories of work and affect theory to analyze the ‘affects of labor’ – the visceral and active consequences of our working environments that metabolize through our bodies and produce our identities, relationships, and communities.

As an organizer, Benitez centers their power building and community convening praxis on abolitionist and transformational justice frameworks. Their organizing is us/for us, in the places and within the communities they call home. Benitez believes in the transformative power of storytelling, radical listening, vulnerability, imagination, and love, and that community and relationship building are necessary for systemic change.

Benitez’s project, Junqtion, seeks to create a virtual gathering space for LGBTQ+ and QTBIPoC trades workers to come together to organize, support, build capacity, and address the racist, homophobic, and patriarchal roots of historically cis male-dominated trades labor.

Trinice McNally (she/her) is a nationally recognized transformative leader, scholar, organizer, and creative committed to the liberation of oppressed people. She is most passionate about developing strategies and best practices for higher education institutions to foster welcoming and inclusive environments for their historically marginalized populations through programmatic, advocacy, and political education efforts, in addition to providing political education and strategy support for DC/MD college students, faculty and staff committed to abolition, immigrant rights, and community accountability.

She is a Black Queer Feminist who spends her time politicizing her students and community. She is a budding-creative who understands cultural work as a necessary intervention to dismantle racial injustice and disrupt the status-quo, combat global anti-blackness & imperialism through fashion, arts, and archiving.

McNally hails from London, England – with her lineage traced to St. Mary’s, Jamaica, by way of Miami, Florida. She is a member of the Black Youth Project 100, National Women’s Studies Association, UndocuBlack Network, Black LGBTQ+ Migrant Project, and Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Inc. She currently serves as the founding director of the Center for Diversity, Inclusion and Multicultural Affairs at the University of the District of Columbia (UDC), one of the nation’s oldest HBCUs.

McNally’s project serves to educate, mobilize, and agitate people around the criminalization of Black migrants and the impact of anti-Blackness resulting from colonization.

Amelia Brown (she/her) had more than 20 years of experience spanning 30 countries and four continents in art and community development. Her project, Revolutionary Rest & Invest, would have addressed the public health emergency of racism through art by creating a space for a cohort of Black women artist leaders to rest, invest in themselves, and invest in their communities through a retreat, training, and projects that establish and exemplify creative crisis management.

Unfortunately, before her Fellowship would have begun, tragedy stuck and on January 16, 2020 Brown suddenly passed away. We are saddened by the sudden loss of such an important leader and visionary and will be memorializing her along with the rest of this year’s Fellowship cohort. Those interested in supporting her family and honoring her legacy can send donations to the Venmo account @AmeliaBrownMemorial.