Lydia X. Z. Brown

(They/Them/Theirs)

Lydia is a community builder and organizer, writer, advocate, educator, strategist, lawyer, and cultural worker dreaming of disability justice and collective liberation. Their work focuses on addressing and ending interpersonal, structural, systemic, and institutional violence targeting disabled people at the margins of the margins - especially surveillance, criminalization, and incarceration at the intersections of disability,queerness, race, gender, faith, language, and nation. Currently, they are creating art and written offerings for their own tarot deck, titled Disability Justice Wisdom Tarot. Lydia is Director of Policy, Advocacy, & External Affairs for the Autistic Women & Nonbinary Network, as well as founder and volunteer director of the Fund for Community Reparations for Autistic People of Color’s Interdependence, Survival, & Empowerment, which is grounded in redistributive justice, mutual aid, and cultivation of generative economies.

They are also Policy Counsel for the Privacy & Data Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology, where they co-lead a project on disability and algorithmic/artificial intelligence discrimination. Lydia has taught as adjunct faculty at Tufts University and Georgetown University, where their courses center queer and trans disabled people of color’s work and perspectives. They also co-edited the path-breaking anthology All the Weight of Our Dreams: On Living Racialized Autism with E. Ashkenazy and Morénike Giwa Onaiwu. Lydia is nonbinary, queer, and ace, and an East Asian, Chinese American survivor of transracial and transnational adoption. Often, their most important work in their communities has no title, job description, or funding, and probably never will.

“I want people to understand that the experiences of queer and trans disabled people of color are vast, rich, and complicated in our many configurations of identities and experiences. I hope to gain stronger connections with other queer and trans people of color doing path-breaking cultural work.”

Photos by Colin Pieters