About

Queer Arts Collective is an autonomous campus space for the creation and celebration of critical queer art, writing, and performance.

QAC was formed out of a collaborative effort between instructors and students who recognized the need for creative queer spaces on campus. From a summer feminist studies course, this project sparked a series of meet-ups and long-term projects from a collective of graduate and undergraduate students invested in queer politics and researched-informed art practices.

Ranging from zine making to performance to illustration and creative non-fiction writing, QAC hosts quarterly meet-ups, coffee hours, and events. For upcoming events see our calendar here.

Meet the Founders

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Co-Founder

Katie Von Wald

Katie Von Wald is a PhD candidate in Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Barabara. Her work looks at the construction of femininity and feminine sexualities through madness, medicine, and performance. Her dissertation project offers a queered history of hysteria to investigate discourses of feminine madness as they relate to the movements of feminized subjects across boundaries of reality and resistance. She received her BA from Boston University in History and International Relations with an emphasis in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her Master’s is from Simmons University in Gender and Cultural Studies. She spent ten years working as a professional modern dancer and enjoys any artistic or creative endeavor.

Co-Founder

Alex Mireles

Alex Mireles is a PhD student in the Department of Feminist Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara. Her work explores questions of race, gender, sexuality, colonialism, and capitalism through aesthetic movements in fashion, beauty, and digital visual cultures. Her master’s thesis “Paisa Aesthetics: Streetwear Fashion and Latinx Aesthetic Labor” conceptualizes paisa as analytic to theorize the un/organized creative labor of Latinx and Chicanx fashion designers, identity formation, and belonging. “Paisa Aesthetics” received the 2022 Charlotte Stough Memorial Prize for innovative scholarship in Feminist Studies and was the UCSB entrant to the WAGS/Proquest Distinguished Master’s Thesis Competition 2022. She is a Crossing Latinidades Mellon Humanities Fellow for the 2023-2024 academic year. She is inspired intellectually and creatively by her work experience in the fashion and retail industry as a wardrobe stylist and consultant.