Student

Pilar Jefferson

Pilar Jefferson is a PhD student in the department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Pilar graduated from Vassar College in 2015 with a BA in Art History and Native American Studies focused on 20th century Native American art and cultural resilience. She is an experienced museum educator and has worked as a program coordinator and teaching artist at institutions including the Museum of the City of New York and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Pilar’s pursuit of a PhD comes out of a desire to understand and support better representation of Indigenous people in museums...

Jessica Jiang

Jessica Jiang is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Her research historicizes Chinese migration in relation to Indigenous nations in the Pacific Northwest borderlands, theorizing dispossession and exclusion as intertwined processes with intimate consequences. Her broader interests lie in critical geography and borderlands history, at the intersections of migration and settler colonialism.

Raised on the ancestral lands of the Duwamish people, Jess is a...

Peter Kim

Peter Kim is a PhD candidate in Comparative Ethnic Studies, and his research examines the ways public institutions inform, shape, and mediate the subject formation of urban youth of color. In particular, he explores how public schools, the juvenile justice system, non-profit community-based organizations, and local government play active roles in how Southeast Asian American youth in Oakland form notions of identity, community, culture and citizenship. Using frameworks of (anti)blackness, afro-pessimism, and social death, he explores possibilities of liberated and empowered subjectivity...

AJ Kurdi

AJ Kurdi is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Ethnic Studies, with a Designated Emphasis in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation research is a comparative study on different forms of ethnic minority queer organizing in Budapest, Montréal and Paris, and how they shape the priorities and political orientations of mainstream LGBTQI movements, laws and public policies in Europe and North America.

His previous work focuses broadly on queer social movement debates and transnational networks in West Asia and the various forms...

Luíza Bastos Lages

Luíza Bastos Lages is a PhD student in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, she comes from Itabirito, Brazil, the ancestral and unceded land of the Guarachués. Luíza is a multimedia artist with a Masters in Art, Culture, and Technology from MIT (2020), an Architecture and Urban Planning BA and Professional degree from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil, (2013) as well as experience in praxical research devised alongside communities and anti-capitalist social movements.

At UC Berkeley, Luíza’s doctoral research centers the contemporary art practices of...

Cynthia Ledesma

Arianna Lunow-Luke

Arianna Lunow-Luke (she/her) is a PhD student in the department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, where she is the recipient of the Chancellor’s Fellowship. She is also pursuing a Graduate Certificate in Food Systems through the Berkeley Food Institute. Born and raised in Kailua, Oʻahu, Ari is a fourth generation Chinese settler of Kanaka Maoli lands in Hawaiʻi. She received her BA in Biology and Ethnic Studies from Brown University.

Ari’s research is centered on Asian settler colonialism and multiculturalism in Hawaiʻi. She is particularly interested in historical and contemporary...

Breylan Martin

Breylan Náajeyistláa Martin is a PhD student in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley where she is a recipient of the Chancellor’s Fellowship. She is Tlingit, Raven-T’akdeintaan Clan whose family is from Hoonah and Tenakee, Alaska. Her interests lie in the continuation of Native culture– specifically through the protection of land, water and resources. She hopes to advocate for alternative ways of being to the capitalist West.

She completed her Bachelors at Emory University in Religion & Anthropology receiving the Eugene Bianchi Prize for her senior...

Jesús Nazario

Jesús Nazario (jehj/jei) is a Nahua scholar from Houston, Texas with ancestral roots in a small Nahua town in Guerrero, Mexico. As a second-year PhD student in Ethnic Studies, Jesús’ research interests are situated at the intersection of food and political Indigenous sovereignty, specifically in relation to Nahua maize practices in Mexico. Jehj is a Chancellor’s Fellow, Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellow, and an inaugural member of the Path to Professoriate Program at UC Berkeley.

Currently, jehj is co-leading two student organizations:...

Larissa Nez

Larissa Nez (Diné) is of the Mud People and born for the Mountain Cove People. Her maternal grandfather is of the Red Running into the Water People and her paternal grandfather is of the Big Water People. She was born and raised in Diné Bikéyah (Navajo Nation).

Larissa is a third year Ph.D. student in the Department of Ethnic Studies, with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, at the University of California, Berkeley. Centering critical Indigenous theory, decolonial theory, and the Black Radical Tradition, her research explores the relationship between Blackness and Indigeneity...