Be Oakley is an artist, writer and publisher based on the on the homeland of the Lenape (Lenapehoking) otherwise know by Ridgewood/Queens, NY. In 2015 they started GenderFail, a publishing outlet that seek to instigate works that expand queer subjectivity by looking at queerness as an identity that challenges capitalist, racist, ableist, zionist, xenophobic, transphobic, homophobic, misogynistic, and anti-environmental ideologies. Genderfail’s core model is not non-for-profit but profit-for-survival or profit-to-continue-our-work-without-other-means-of-capital and most importantly to make money for others I publish, to create profit-for-labor. With GenderFail, Oakley has published over 120 editions publications with works by A.L. Stiener, Abigail Lucien, Paul Soulellis, Lex Brown, Coco Klockner, Morgan Bassichis, Eileen Myles, Pamela Sneed, Viva Ruiz, E. Jane and many many more. In 2022 Oakley was awarded a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Grant for their ongoing work with GenderFail.

Chris E. Vargas is a transdisciplinary artist originally from Los Angeles, CA. He earned his MFA from the Art Practice department at Berkeley in 2011. He is the Executive Director of MOTHA, the Museum of Transgender Hirstory & Art, a critical and conceptual arts and hirstory institution highlighting the contributions of trans art to the cultural and political landscape. In 2016, he received a Creative Capital award in the Emerging Fields category. In 2020, he was a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, and this year 2024, he is a Latinx Artist Fellow.

Jeanne Vaccaro is a scholar and curator whose writing and social practice trace the idiosyncrasies of the archive to activate liberation histories and coalitions. She holds a Ph.D in Performance Studies from New York University and is Assistant Professor of Transgender Studies and Museum Studies at the University of Kansas. She was a research fellow at the Kinsey Institute and inaugural scholar-curator at the ONE Archives. She curated Foucault on Acid, with paintings by Grace Rosario (2021), and nothing lower than I, with sculptures by Xandra Ibarra (2022). She also organized Bring Your Own Body: transgender between archives and aesthetics for Cooper Union (2015). Her scholarly writing is published in GLQ, the Journal of Modern Craft, Radical History Review, Social Text, TSQ, and Trap Door, and her forthcoming book Handmade: feelings and textures of transgender, was awarded the Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation. She is co-founder of the NYC Trans Oral History Project, a community archive partnership with the New York Public Library.