SUMMER
SYMPOSIUM
August 26-30th
Yes! We are doing it again! Welcome to the second annual Summer Symposium, organized by Bathers Library. The symposium is a five day series of talks, performances, screenings, readings, gatherings and workshops bringing together creative people and projects to share their work. This year, we have about twenty-five sessions and about twenty-five workshops, plus opening and closing celebrations—so it’s going to be a busy week!
You can buy passes which will get you into everything listed below, as well as one (or more) workshop(s) (depending on the level you choose—listings for workshops coming soon!).
All proceeds go to paying participating artists and all events are NOTAFLOF. We will have single day passes at the door if you can only make it for one day or one event.
Workshops listings coming soon!
THU/27
1-5pm
Daytime Dinner Two Two Daytime Dinner first came about 3 years ago in 2023 when so many folks were working, isolated. It's not a dinner at all but it offered sustenance of another variety — mid day sunlight, places to sit and work, printed matter, good-spirited humans and side-by-side chatter.
In the spirit of Summer Symposium, of alliteration, we're revitalizing Daytime Dinner in the same communal manner. Not an event, not a club, no meeting agenda.
Come click clack your computer, write a poem, draw, drink tea, yap about which summer symposium you're going to next... If there's a seat, it's yours.
Two Two (3221 Grand Ave, Oakland) is a collection of experiments from creative minds overflowing—sketches from our inner self. An abstract plan. A conceptual space in flux. Where artists play.
6pm
Is This a Book?/How Could a Book Be?: A Show & Tell of Zines, Book Reports and Other Book-Shaped Things
Daniel Lucas, Christie George, Jessi Haley, Helen Shewolfe Tseng
In this session, a handful of Bay Area bookmakers will share projects that push at the edges of what a book can be—zines, book reports, fan nonfiction, readers—and talk about the possibilities of more responsive and dynamic forms. Participants are invited to bring a beloved book-shaped thing to share with the group. The session is a preview of and pep rally for A Life of Their Own (ALOTO), an all-day symposium on books, what we make of them, and what they make of us, happening October 18 in San Francisco at Problem Library.
Daniel Lucas is a designer, educator and the Program Director of Problem Library and The School of Other Fields, a creative mentorship program for Bay Area teenagers.
Christie George is the author of The Emergency Was Curiosity and Principal of The Togethering Lab, a collaborative research and publishing project that experiments in public with ways and forms of being together.
Jessi Haley is the Editorial Director of Cita Press, a feminist indie press publishing carefully designed open access editions of public domain books written by women.
Helen Shewolfe Tseng is the author of Trickster at the End of a World, published by Sming Sming Books; an editor for Taper, a journal of size-constrained computational poetry; a contributor to The HTML Review and Ensemble Park; the creator of Preambles, published by Bathers Library Artist Games; and a longtime designer and illustrator for various books and publications.
7:15pm
On Abstract Painting in the Bay Area
Mads Frechette, Ali Vaughn, Heather Brown, Ana Diaz Korin
Bay Area painters on abstraction, process, and place. Slides of recent work accompany the conversation.
Ali Vaughan is an artist based in Richmond, California. She was born and raised in Bakersfield, California, and received dual BA degrees in Art Practice (with Honors) and Art History from Stanford University in 2019. She regularly works between mediums of oil painting, drawing, and sculpture. Through process-based abstraction, her work examines notions of place and identity.
Heather Brown’s solo exhibitions include Psychic Forms, Five Car Garage, Santa Monica; Flocking Together, Alto Beta, Altadena; Bedfellows, Monte Vista Projects, Los Angeles; Thank You For Your Childhood, Parker Jones, Los Angeles; Drawings, Parker Jones, Los Angeles; and Heather Brown: New Paintings, Black Dragon Society, Los Angeles. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at various Los Angeles venues, such as Weekend, Black Dragon Society, Honor Fraser, Shrine, Megan Mulrooney, and Michael Kohn. She received an MFA from UCLA and a BA from UCSB. She lives and works in Los Angeles and Oakland, California.
Ana Díaz Korin is a queer Venezuelan artist interested in translating cycles of upheaval and decline into pattern-based paintings. Their painting practice is influenced by their personal experience with displacement and the visual language of urban decay. They are interested in looking at wider gestures of abandonment, collapse, and repair, as indications of rupturing systems and historical throughlines. Díaz Korin received a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2023 and their MFA from the California College of the Arts. They currently live and work in San Francisco, California.
Mads Frechette is an artist living and working in San Francisco, California. Born in the Adirondacks of New York State, she studied at Pratt Institute from 2010-2012 before dropping out and moving to California to work for numerous failed startups. Her practice encompasses drawing, painting, and ceramic sculpture. Her heavily worked abstract paintings are time capsules, absorbing traces of the world around her and her own inner world.
7:15
Recalcitrant & Recombinant
Alex Arzt, Bhumikorn Kongtaveelert, Odessa Avianna Perez, Sylvia Santillanez, Xiaowei R. Wang, Jennifer Williams
Bathers Library's very own Nonfiction Cohort presents work on place, ecology & lineage with topics such as cloudseeding, feral cabbages, ancestral wanderings in Puerto Rico and print history in the Bay Area.
Alex Arzt is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and gardener based in Oakland. She runs a Riosgraph press called A Magic Mountain and is currently writing her first book about place and plants.
Bhumikorn Kongtaveelert is a bit confused about what he is, but he is currently based in Sacramento, CA. He has been learning how to write with the Bathers Creative Non-Fiction cohort and to focus on the small things.
Odessa Avianna Perez is a therapist, writer and movement facilitator living in Alameda, CA. She currently finds herself deep in exploration at the intersection of somatics, ancestral and cultural reclamation, and liberation.
Sylvia Santillanez is a writer, printmaker, and archival researcher based in Berkeley. She loves print, analog, and place-based media and culture.
Xiaowei R. Wang is a writer, artist and researcher based between Berkeley and Chicago. They are interested in how technology shapes our ideas of nature and the body.
Jennifer Williams is a writer, musician and therapist based in Oakland, California. She received her MFA in Fiction from Mills College and hosts mini-writing retreats at Winslow House Project in Vallejo. She has two dogs.
8:30
Sound of Place, Shimmer of Memory: A Brief History of Reverb
Matt Carney
This informal lecture & listening exercise will look at the scientific, cultural, and personal history of reverb from caverns and canyons to pedals named after caverns and canyons.
Matt Carney is an editor, musician, and game developer living in San Francisco.
FRI/28
6pm
The Indie Media RenaissanceBay Area Current, Oakland Review of Books, Coyote Media, organized by Ana Tuazon The Bay Area has been experiencing a renaissance in independent publishing—within the last year and change, a number of new outlets have established themselves in the media landscape, offering alternative perspectives on local culture and politics. This panel brings together editors from Bay Area Current, Oakland Review of Books, and Coyote Media to discuss the highs and lows of getting a new publication off the ground, the legacy of indie publishing in the Bay, and how communities of readers, writers, and supporters can help ensure the sustainability of these projects for years to come.
6pm (Offsite)
Labor in the Arts: Moving Beyond StudyAch Kab, Muffy Koster, Nico Maimon, ZH Leonard, Emily HansenOver the course of the last year, the Labor in the Arts Working Group, a coalition of labor-oriented artists/arts workers, has grown out of union struggles, reading groups, and autonomous organizing efforts. This session convenes the group and invites the broader community to address the two main strategies LAWG has taken up, 1) assessing the unique organizing challenges that face arts workers in the Bay Area, and 2) experimenting with new forms and styles of art making that broaden our community and deepen our understanding of what it means to labor in the arts. This session will include a panel presenting reflecting on a year of arts organizing by Ach Kabal and Muffy Koster, followed by a series of performances and readings on the theme of labor in the arts.
Ach Kab (they/them) is a butch arab dyke worker with the Industrial Workers of the World. Their practice is grounded in deep support and collaboration, offering their labor primarily as a technician for live performance, an archivist for the Bay Area Lesbian Archives, and an organizer with CounterPulse Workers United. They love to dance, craft, swim, wrestle, play the banjo, explore secrets and listen.
Muffy Koster (she/her) is a writer, performing artist, and graduate student. Her scholarship focuses on gender and technology in the contemporary workplace, especially in service, hospitality, and domestic labor. Her creative work attends to the history, present, and emergent future of worker's theaters. She is an avid crabber and amateur playwright.
The Labor in the Arts Working Group (LAWG) is a diverse collective of performing artists, technicians, and administrative workers developing an analysis of labor struggles within the Bay Area arts scene. We meet every second Saturday from 3-5 at Adobe books in San Francisco to learn and plug in to labor struggles in the arts—join us!
7:00pm
Interspecies EntanglementsHelen Shewolfe Tseng
Performances and discussion from artists, writers, and hybrid practitioners whose work involves enduring inquiry, relationship, or collaboration with some aspect of the more-than-human natural world.
Helen Shewolfe Tseng is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, wildlife naturalist, and computational poet based in San Francisco. Her practice emerges from the crossroads of mythology, ecology, and technology, and has taken the forms of works on paper, experimental publications, games, rituals, performance lectures, conceptual research labs, browser-based works, long-term observational studies, and more. Helen is the author of Trickster at the End of a World, a book of writing and art on coyotes, published by Sming Sming Books in 2026.
7pm (Offsite)
CRASHOUT: A CONVERSATIONQuinn Edlin, Grace Iyer, Willow Wilderness Hour, Dylan Clevenger
Panel/discussion/around writings on CRASHOUTS (psychosis/grief/addiction/being a basket case), largely inspired by Hesse K.'s ""Disquiet Drive"" and Daniel Paul Schreber's ""Memoirs of My Nervous Illness."" Reading/Panel. How do we approach writing about it these topics in a way that is honest, funny, brash, abased? Kickoff to two-month writing workshop at Bathers.
Quinn Edlin is a writer and educator from Berkeley, CA. She is the author of the book, Unburdened: An Exploration of Shame in Short Story, Interview, and Essay. She is the founder of the writing collective DRY MOUTH. She was a 2025 Fall resident at Bathers Library. Quinn builds worlds heavily influenced by gayness, Blackness, and disruptive eroticism.
8:00pm
Asian Girl Onlinetiny lei
The average internet user is an asian girl online, at least in the most global of terms. What does it mean to be online now? A critique from the faceless mass in the era of AI-powered internet feed.
tiny lei is an asian girl online. at present, they are an artist, archivist, creative technologist, writer & independent scholar currently in search of some proverbial future, whatever that means. they are the communications manager at the institute for the critical study of zionism, as well as a researcher for the center for racial justice at uc santa cruz.
8:00pm (offsite)
T 4 Two (Episode 1) Francis Weiss Rabkin, Leslie Allison
"T 4 Two" is the transmasc rom-com tv show we all deserve to binge. Sidestepping the hot mess monopoly of Hollywood and bringing the goods directly to the people, the show is being reenvisioned as a live theater series where audiences can catch up with the story over regular play "episodes" and build a vibrant community through queer/trans "appointment" theater. This will be the first live reading of the pilot script with live score performed by Leslie Allison and friends. Afterwards we would love to have a talkback and conversation about the potential of the serial theater form.
Francis Weiss Rabkin is a writer and theater maker living in Oakland. Their writing has been read and staged at the New York Theatre Workshop, The Brick, Bushwick Starr, Dixon Place, and the Poetry Project. They wrote for the Apple TV+ show "Dickinson." They have collaborated on plays, experimental opera, and music performances with their partner in art and life, Leslie Allison, since 2013.
Leslie Lancaster Allison is a multidisciplinary composer recently moved to Oakland. They are the author of the chapbook Martha (Ugly Duckling Presse), and have written about music and dance for The Brooklyn Rail and The Chicago Reader. Their music compositions have appeared in theatre and dance performances; concert halls and house shows; art films and museum installations. Through their music studio, Resonant Body, Leslie teaches somatic singing and composition in private lessons and group workshops, with a focus on trans voices. Their solo album Touch Wood will be released this fall.
9:00pm
Partying at the end of the world: yearning for alternative futuresM Kuznetsov
Parties, nightlife, or other community-centered rituals offer us a space to prototype other ways of being with each other and as ourselves, of asking more of our longterm vision, of creating rules that don't make sense elsewhere just yet. A session that discusses art installations I've done at parties around trans technology-centered futures and imagining alternative futures. Part of the session will invite participants to dream, worldbuild, and explore their preferred futures as alternatives to despair and nonaction.
M Kuznetsov is a futurist, technologist, and installation artist from the Midwest who leans on their background in sociotechnical systems and biology to create placemaking, visceral work about existing in a world that is still coming to be. Often situated within nightlife or rituals, their multimedia work seeks to foster vulnerability and collective yearning. Since co-founding the art collective Encoder Rat Decoder Rat in 2020, they have been developing their vision of the rat techno future: a subversive, radical lens for alternative pluriversal futures.
SAT/29
10amPracticing Coherence: An Embodied Inquiry into Relational Knowledge
Nkechi Njaka + Tauwoo
This session is an artist-led experience that integrates movement, sound, contemplative practice, and neuroscience to explore collective coherence as an ecological and social process. The session positions coherence—within nervous systems, between bodies, and across environments—as both an artistic inquiry and a form of communal care. We will explore how shared practices of breath, listening, and embodied presence can support wellbeing, empathy, and collective resilience in a time of widespread fragmentation. There will be a brief talk, a guided meditation with sound, a participatory art experience and performance art offering.
Nkechi Deanna Njaka (she/her) is a neuroscientist, choreographer, mindfulness expert, and leading meditation guide whose interdisciplinary work intersects science, art, and contemplative practice. She is the founder of The Compass, NDN lifestyle studio and the co-founder of DreamWell, a sleep app. A 2021 Kennedy Center Artist in Residence and Garrison Institute Fellow, she also serves as an Advisor to Chorus Meditation, is faculty at Esalen, and is a lululemon ambassador for her leadership in mindfulness. When not publicly speaking on mindfulness, or guiding people in embodied presence or somatic liberation, Nkechi is the co-host of the podcast Dating White and the other 1/2 of the music and mindfulness project RESONANCE.
Cory Tauwoo (he/him) is an Oakland based songwriter, singer and multi-instrumentalist. His work draws inspiration from West African, Middle Eastern, and Indian rhythms as well as artists like Radiohead, Photay, James Blake, and Patrick Watson. He is 1/2 of the music and mindfulness project RESONANCE.
11:15amGeography of Embodied Narratives
Kirby Stenger with Nkechi Njaka
This one-hour panel centers Personal Project, a therapeutic portraiture practice by Oakland-based artist Kirby Stenger that explores identity as fluid and continually becoming. Rooted in Queer, Trans, and feminine narratives, the work engages photography as a space for witnessing, trust, healing, and transformation.
Moderated by Nkechi Njaka, the conversation brings together the artist and project participants to reflect on both the act of creating the image and the experience of being seen within it. Together, we will move through questions of embodiment, narrative reclamation, and the shifting nature of identity, considering what it means to witness someone in transition, in the space before identity has fully taken shape in language. In doing so, we explore how moments of being seen can transform not only the subject, but all who are present.
Kirby Stenger (they/them) is a Queer, non-binary, Oakland-based artist and photographer whose work explores the delicate intersection between our true selves and the societal narratives imposed upon us. Working primarily in film, they create portraiture that centers Queer, Trans, and feminine identities, investigating how selfhood is shaped, obscured, and revealed. Their ongoing body of work, Personal Project, reflects this inquiry through a collaborative and intuitive approach to portraiture, inviting subjects to be seen on their own terms. This practice extends into their debut photobook, Less Like a Fixed Point, a 225-page collection exploring identity as fluid and continually becoming.
Nkechi Deanna Njaka (see above).
12:30pm
Tasty Taboos: Culinary No-nos of the Past, Present and Future
Toni P
This will be a talk about cultural culinary taboos throughout history, from pork to beef to horse meat to insects. Many a snooty foodie in the U.S. would gladly wolf down a plate of escargot swimming in garlic butter, but would clutch their pearls at the thought of eating sago grubs in Southeast Asia. Why? What did (or didn't) people eat "back then" compared to now, and in our rapidly changing world, what does the future hold?
Toni P is an artist, writer and professional baker-turned high school culinary arts teacher. She is currently on the zine committee for Rock Paper Scissors Collective.
1:45pm
Seize Piedmont: The Art Project
Cassie Thornton, Oakland Review of Books
Cassie Thornton of the Oakland Review of Books collective leads a teach-in and brainstorm on the subject of Piedmont: what it is, why it is, who it has excluded and terrorized in its centurylong history, and how we, as Oaklanders, might begin to fuck with their shit. The session is the educational component of ORB's forthcoming "Seize Piedmont Community Art + Design Perennial: Innovation in the class war space," which dares to ask the question: What if eating the rich were actually just a design-thinking problem?
ORB is the Oakland Review of Books, an exercise in counterprogramming.
Cassie Thornton is an artist, writer, and organizer who creates spaces for the unknown, disobedience, and unexpected forms of collective care. Her work spans institutional critique, insurgent architecture, hypnosis, performance, and other social practices that probe the soft spots in capitalist life. She has built an alternative credit reporting system for survivors of gentrification, hypnotized hedge fund managers, finger-painted with grime collected from banks, gifted cursed paintings to profiteering bankers, appeared as the oldest person at tech conferences, and taught feminist economics to yogis (and vice versa). More recently, she started a social clinic disguised as a café and has used art as a decoy for building an international mutual aid network. She is the author of The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future (Pluto Press). Her stranger, more recent work can be found at feministecondept.substack.com.
3:00pm
People Explain Gertrude Stein to Me and The Other Way Around
Oakland Review of Books, Pauline Kerschen, Paul Ebenkamp, Marthine Satris
Pauline Kerschen and Paul Ebenkamp explain Oakland-raised poet Gertrude Stein to Marthine Satris, who has been trying for years to get her whole deal. Think: poetics of nonsense, the difference between emphasis and repetition, her influence on the (much later) Berkeley-based LANGUAGE poetry movement, even more on repetition, and how the Key System paid for Modernism.
Pauline Kerschen is author of The Warm South, which won the Northern California Book Award in fiction, and a founding editor at Oakland Review of Books.
Paul Ebenkamp is author of The Louder The Room the Darker the Screen (Timeless, Infinite Light), Regular Acid Consciousness (Spiral Editions) and Sunworshippers (Ugly Duckling Presse). Marthine Satris is an editor, writer, and reader who lives in Oakland.
4:15pmCognitive Sovereignty in the age of GenAI
Lisa Dawn Colvin
Ugh. Everyone is sick of hearing about AI. However, what if you are interacting with it out of economic necessity? This session will address the ways in which interacting with AI shapes our brains (cognitive labor, sensemaking under pressure) and some cognitive preservation techniques to mitigate harms to ourselves and our communities.
Lisa Dawn Colvin's 30-year journey in AI began with linguistic and ontology research at Cycorp. There, she explored how codified human common sense and knowledge enable machine reasoning and language understanding. As a Women in AI Ethics+ fellow, she studies how generative AI reshapes human reasoning, and what people and organizations can do to protect their capacity to think, learn, and make meaning on their own terms.
5:30pmQuiet and Loud Futures: Imagining Technology In and Beyond Silicon Valley
Andreas Hepp
Silicon Valley broadcasts its futures loudly–as manifestos, demos, and inevitabilities–while small experimental communities, from rationalists to makers, quietly build the worlds those futures come from. Drawing on several years of fieldwork for my forthcoming book Pioneer Communities, this session asks who actually gets to author our digital futures, and puts that “loud futuring” in conversation with the quieter, communal world-building that happens in spaces like Bathers. I'd love to run it less as a lecture than as a shared conversation about what it means to imagine – and reclaim – the future.
Andreas Hepp is Professor of Media and Communications and Head of ZeMKI, Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research, University of Bremen, Germany. He previously worked at the University of Trier, the University of Karlsruhe (now KIT), the Technical University of Ilmenau and the University of Münster.
6:45pmReading from “What Tech Calls Governing”
Adrian Daub A reading and Q+A with Adrian Daub, author of “What Tech Calls Governing” a followup to his book “What Tech Calls Thinking” that explores which ideas of politics, power, and dominance characterize the tech industry, and how those ideas came to be.
Adrian Daub is an academic and critic based in San Francisco and Berlin. He is currently the J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor in the Humanities in the Departments of Comparative Literature and German Studies at Stanford University, where he specializes in culture and politics of the nineteenth century, as well as questions of gender and sexuality. Since 2019, he has also served as the Faculty Director of the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research.
8pm
Assemblage Practices
Brian Ang, Paul Ebenkamp
Brian Ang and Paul Ebenkamp are part of an emergent poetics called “assemblage poetics.” They will read and give an introduction to and discuss latest thoughts on assemblage poetics. Discussion will seek participation from the audience including connections with the audience’s practices; materials: totalitycantos.net/assemblagepractices.html
Brian Ang wrote The Totality Cantos (Atelos 2022). totalitycantos.net includes the complete text and a generator that randomizes assemblages of its one thousand sections. Current poetic project: A Thousand Albums, open to the totality of music. Recent prose: ""Post-Crisis to Assemblage Poetics"" in Annulet’s American Poetry and Poetics, 2008-2025 folio.
Paul Ebenkamp is author of The Louder The Room The Darker The Screen (Timeless, Infinite Light), Regular Acid Consciousness (Spiral Editions) and Sunworshippers (Ugly Duckling Presse); makes music as Position (paulebenkamp.bandcamp.com); and with Andrew Kenower hosts the Woolsey Heights reading series at their home in Berkeley CA. Despite Editions, a small press, is a new Woolsey-based collaborative endeavor with Andrew and Lara Durback."
SUN/30
10amAfter the revolution, who's going to change the diapers?hosted by Margaret McCarthy
A family-friendly screening of a documentary investigating the art of cleaning, washing, diapering, mending, proofreading, taking out the trash, paying bills, etc, etc, etc. Open to parents, caregivers, and anyone interested in maintenance. Coloring pages available for children, crying babies welcome.
Margaret McCarthy (she/her) is a writer, performer, nonprofit executive, and mother of two. She has performed her work at SOMArts, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Artist Television Access, and for nine years as an ensemble member of the San Francisco Neo-Futurists, where she also served as Co-Artistic Director. She is on the board of the Center for Artistic Activism.
12:30pm
Gardens of Belonging/Beauty as Emergent
Cynthia PhươngAnh Lê + Terremoto Landscape
Interdisciplinary artist, Cyn Lê and Terremoto Landscape will each speak about their recent work in relation to the idea of the garden—in Cyn’s work, through their project “Gardens of Belonging” and in Terremoto’s work via a theory of beauty as emergent property.
1:45pm
The Poetry and Philosophy of Oakland Code Enforcement
Sarah Lockhart
This session will provide an overview of the concepts and practices of the City of Oakland's Code Enforcement as they relate to DIY spaces. Examples of Code Enforcement actions against specific DIY sites will illustrate the philosophy of Code Enforcement and (at times absurdist) poetry of this agency's actions and statements. There will be time for Q&A + discussion.
Sarah Lockhart is the Executive Director of Safer DIY Spaces, an Oakland-based non-profit that assists low-income artists and community groups with improvements to “non-code compliant” buildings, and consults on methods for long-term stability of these spaces. Sarah spent 20 years managing arts spaces including: ATA, The Lab, Pro Arts, LCM, and 21 Grand, which she co-founded and which closed as a result of code compliance problems with the City of Oakland. Sarah has produced and performed at arts events in many venues: from warehouses and parking lots to clubs and museums. Sarah is also a licensed tax preparer for artists and arts nonprofits.
3:00pm
Resurrection of the Strange City: an experiment in public history in three acts
Kate Ortega and friends
“Resurrection of the Strange City” will be an experimental talk on the possibilities of alternative public history projects in San Francisco and how experimenting with public history (looping in counter culture, art, and community/personal histories) can tell us what we can inherently see about the city. In a moment unfortunately defined by gentrification, corrupt city politics, and the looming threat of tech-fasciscm, this will serve as a celebration of what makes San Francisco strange, unique, and a forever home for liberation, freedom of expression, and cultural experimentation. This will also serve as the public introduction to the Barbary Coast Fringe Historical society, a experimental public history project that aims to reframe San Francisco and it’s history by the experimental culture, niche tales, scene makers, and communities that make the San Franciscan past, present, and future so remarkable. Event will incorporate performance, a talk, and live music .
Kate Ortega (She/Her) is an independent curator, public art historian, and cultural practitioner. Her practice centers on the intersections of queer visual culture, theory, and community, legacies of avant-garde and counterculture movements of the 20th Century, and popular music/musicology, performance, and punk culture. Ortega is also a practicing visual artist and musician who folds performance art with queer dance punk music with the band Girl Into Destruction. She has received two BAs in Art History and Anthropology from the University of Nevada, Reno, and an MA in Museum Studies from the University of San Francisco.
And (maybe) more to come! Stay tuned!