Social Workers Confronting Racial Injustice Conference
Sandra Rosenbaum School of Social Work

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (she/they)

A 40ish mixed race Sri Lankan, Irish and Galician nonbinary femme with curly brown silver and purple hair, lying on a couch looking at the viewer horizontally. They have rose gold aviator frames, thick eyebrows, red lipstick and sand colored skin, and are looking at the viewer with a kind of tired but hopefully crip wonder. They wear a blue denim vest with a pin that says Neurodivergent Universe above a pink and blue image of a ringed planet, and a black tank top with yellow lettering that read Talk To Plants, Not Cops is barely visible. They have a tattoo of the words "We begin by listening" in magenta cursive script on their left arm.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (she/they) is a nonbinary femme autistic disabled writer, space creator and disability and transformative justice movement worker of Burgher and Tamil Sri Lankan, Irish and Galician/Roma ascent. They are the author or co-editor of ten books, including The Future Is DIsabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs, Tonguebreaker, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, and Dirty River.

A 2020-2021 Disability Futures Fellow, since 2009 they have been a lead performer with disability justice performance collective Sins Invalid; since 2020 they have been on the programming committee of the Disability and Intersectionality Summit. Raised in rust belt central Massachusetts and shaped by T’karonto and Oakland, they are currently at work building Living Altars/ The Stacey Park Milbern Liberation Arts Center, an organization and accessible residency for disabled 2QTBIPOC writers and creators.