Introducing the
Sins Invalid Team
Image Description: A brown-skinned woman with red lipstick and perfectly arched eyebrows looks directly at the camera with a playful and determined gaze. They are wearing a top patterned with black, white, blue and red, with black and white polka dot straps, and their dark hair is pulled back from their face. Their hands are clasped in front of them, with elbows resting on a clear surface. They have gold rings on their thumbs and left pinky, two chunky silver bracelets, and two necklaces, one amethyst and one gold.
Patricia Berne is the Co-Founder, Executive and Artistic Director of Sins Invalid. Berne’s training in clinical psychology focused on trauma and healing for survivors of interpersonal and state violence. Their professional background includes advocacy for immigrants who seek asylum due to war and torture; community organizing within the Haitian diaspora; international support work for the Guatemalan democratic movement; work with incarcerated youth toward alternatives to the criminal legal system; offering mental health support to survivors of violence; and advocating for LGBTQI and disability perspectives within the field of reproductive genetic technologies. Berne’s experiences as a Japanese-Haitian queer disabled woman provides grounding for her work creating “liberated zones” for marginalized voices. Berne was awarded the Disability Futures Fellowship in 2020 and they are widely recognized for their work to establish the framework and practice of disability justice.
Image description: A fat white Jewish femme with red lips, a ruffled red dress, dark hair, blue sparkly eye makeup and large light blue plastic earrings shaped like scissors.
Nomy Lamm has worked with Sins Invalid since 2008 as a performer, and as Creative Director since 2017. Nomy is a multi-media artist, musician, performer and ritualist whose passion is supporting people to move through fear and the impacts of oppression to express themselves and connect in authentic and liberatory ways. Nomy holds a BA in Multimedia Art and Political Economy from The Evergreen State College, and an MFA in Fiction from San Francisco State University. She lives on occupied Squaxin land in Olympia, WA with her partner Lisa, and their dogs Dandelion, Momma, and Romance.
Image Description: A young woman with light brown skin and long brown hair, smiling and sitting on a bale of hay surrounded by pumpkins. She wears jeans with fashionably torn knees and a pink t-shirt that says “Save las Tetas” with white handprints on her chest.
Karina is an aspiring cultural worker born in Mexico and raised in Southern California. Her background in care work and her experiences as an undocumented queer Latina woman influenced her interests in harm reduction, community care, and working towards more sustainable ways of life for all body/minds. Karina joined the Sins team in 2019 and in her personal time she can also be found taking trips to the farmers market with close kin or dancing to music from her homeland.
Image description: a Black trans person in a green, gold, and teal collarless button up short sleeve shirt looks directly at the camera. He wears a dangly earring in his right ear. He is not smiling. He has a curly afro and a fade. Behind him there is a microwave on a white countertop, and some framed pink postcards.
Cyrée Jarelle Johnson is a poet and writer from Piscataway, New Jersey. SLINGSHOT, his debut poetry collection, was published by Nightboat Books in 2019 and won the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry. He is a Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow with Poetry Foundation and the inaugural Poet in Residence at Brooklyn Public Library.
Image Description: A sweet-faced white Jewish nonbinary trans person with short hair, sitting in a wooden chair in a luscious garden space with California poppies in the foreground. They are wearing a grey argyle sweater, grey pants and silvery sneakers, with a furry little light brown dog on their lap.
Mordecai Cohen Ettinger has over 25 years experience as a multi-sector social justice activist and organizer, holistic healer, fundraiser, radical scholar, and educator. Mordecai is the Founding Director of the Health Justice Commons, and co-founded the TGI Justice Project. He is adjunct faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies where he teaches critical science, technology, and medicine studies. Schooled by years of movement work, and trained in Somatic Experiencing, Reiki and Cranial Sacral therapy, they have studied with Dr. Peter Levine, founder of Somatic Experiencing and Dr. Bessel van der Kolk. Mordecai is crip, queer and trans/ non-binary. He is a survivor of radiation poisoning and what is designated by the UN to be medical torture. They are here for advancing disability justice for our futures to be possible.
Image description: Lettie, a curly-haired light brown-skinned person, stands in front of a brick wall cradling a bundle of orange marigold flowers. They are wearing a black face mask, sunglasses, and a red huipil embroidered with bright yellow roses. Tattoos of flowers and a lichen covered rock adorn their collarbone and arm.
Lettie Robles-Tovar is a trans disabled cultural worker, street artist, and printmaker who works with community-based movements to reimagine public spaces as liberated zones. Their work draws inspiration from liberation movements centering decolonization, abolition, and disability justice. In their free time, they enjoy watching B-horror movies, urban exploring, and tending to native plants. Lettie currently resides in xučyun (Huichin), home of the Chochenyo-speaking Ohlone people.
Image Description: A white Latinx Jewish person with brown and silver hair shaved on the sides, with black cat-eye glasses, a lip ring and multiple earrings. They are wearing a black shirt, blue overalls and a red and white keffiyeh. They are sitting at a wood table in front of a grey stucco wall gesturing outward with open hands.
J/E is a poet, translator, social justice interpreter, teacher, facilitator, urban cyclist, and co-founder of the language justice and language experimentation collaborative Antena Aire (2010-2020). They publish poems, translations, and visual-textual works with numerous small independent presses and in various DIY/DIT incarnations, and have received support in many forms from many entities, including CantoMundo, the Academy of American Poets, the City of Los Angeles, and the NEA. Jen/Eleana lives on unceded Tongva land in Los Angeles and identifies as a queer white Latinx/Argentinean Jewish BDS supporter who grew up mostly monolingual in a bilingual/bicultural family. They passionately believe in language justice practices as a powerful intersection between healing, solidarity work, and the transformative possibilities of language. More information: www.channeltransmitrepeat.com.
Image Description: A Latina woman with long dark hair wearing a shirt that says “Piss On Pity,” with red lips and a huge smile. She is seated in her wheelchair in front of a fence with a large sign or vehicle behind her. There is a red strap around her waist, connected to something off-screen. She appears to be at a protest or direct action.
María R. Palacios is a poet, author, spoken word performer, motivational speaker, social change advocate, disability rights activist, mentor, and workshop facilitator whose work has appeared on numerous multi-media publications, conferences, and live events over the last three decades. María’s work centers around illustrating the power and beauty of disabled people without negating the truths surrounding the ableism and oppression faced by disabled communities around the world.
Maria’s work includes various genres of art ranging from written collections of rebellious poetic storytelling, to passionate spoken word pieces and sarcastic illustrations of disability themed cartoons aimed at calling out ableism.
Maria is one of the Capitol Crawlers from the iconic march of 1990 that passed the ADA. Her advocacy, since then, has taken many forms eventually morphing into her current voice –a voice unafraid of sharing the survival stories of the disabled people the world wants to forget. She has been a Sins performer since 2007.
In the artistic world, Maria is known as the Goddess on Wheels.
Image description: breana, a Black genderless transgender person, kneels in a black denim outfit and black leather fitted cap framed by a circle of fallen cottonwood branches fashioned into a structure
breana is an interdisciplinary community practice artist interested in memory work, pleasure as medicine, capitalism harm reduction, and ecosystems of care. Their work centers easeful collective action and prioritizing rest within the communities they are a part of and support.
Image Description: A smiling brown-skinned boi with short black and gray hair and a beard smiles as light bounces off the Rio Grande behind them. They’re wearing a grey sweatshirt that says “St. Olaf.”
Lazarus Letcher (they/them) is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at the University of New Mexico on Tiwa Pueblo land, focusing on linking homophobia and transphobia to white supremacy culture and examining QTBIPOC art as resistance. Laz has written for Autostraddle, and the occasional dry academic journal. They play viola in the leftist folk band Eileen & the In-Betweens and for art installations/durational performances with the group Stages of Tectonic Blackness.
Image description: R is a white person with short brown hair and brown eyes. They have dark eyebrows and a strong jaw. In this photo, they are wearing a bright yellow sweatshirt with the sleeves rolled up and black shorts, and their head is tilted sideways as they grin at the camera
R Merriman-Goldring
Development Director
R Merriman-Goldring is a queer disabled storyteller, fundraiser, and community builder. Prior to joining the Sins team, R served as a lead organizer with Philly Thrive, a multi-racial community organization that won the permanent closure of the East Coast’s largest and oldest oil refinery. During their time with Philly Thrive, R stewarded fundraising to dramatically expand the organization’s capacity, staffing, and budget, and developed a media skills training program that invests radically in the artistic vision of Black youth. R also helped launch The Climate Museum, the U.S.’s first museum dedicated to climate change and develop the museum’s inaugural Mellon Fellowship in Climate and Inequality.
✨Community Partners✨
Sins Invalid is fortunate to have long-standing partnerships with some amazing Bay Area organizations.
Dancers Group
San Francisco Women Against Rape
Health Justice Commons
Catalyst Project
Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project
Forward Together
✨Sins Invalid Funders✨
The Hewlett Foundation
The Ford Foundation
Horizons Foundation
Zellerbach Family Foundation
Blue Heart – Social Good Fund
Kindle Project
General Service Foundation
National Arts & Disability Center
Urgent Action Fund
California Arts Council
Akonadi Foundation
