Dora Santana identifies as a black Brazilian trans woman warrior, scholar, activist, artist, story teller of experiences embodied in language and flesh. She holds a Master’s degree in African and African Diaspora Studies by the University of Texas at Austin where she is currently finishing her PhD. Her most recent work has just been published in the Transgender Studies Quarterly – TSQ – The Issue of Blackness under the title “Transitionings and Returnings: Experiments with the Poetics of Transatlantic Water,” where she emphasizes the healing role of ancestral energies in the African Diaspora as an important embodied knowledge that guides black trans people in our path of resistant and transitioning across imposed limits of gender, geographies and the secular.

Dora has been the keynote speaker for the Black Trans Advocacy Conference; is one of the Founders of the Brazilian Forum of Black Trans People and has been featured in the Daily Texan Newspaper and worked as an instructor on issues of race, gender, sexuality, class and nationality.

Connecting with communities that assure the survival and thriving especially of trans people of color in situations of vulnerability by creating possibilities of dismantling intersecting oppressive systems such as anti-blackness, transphobia, classism and xenophobia is what moves her.