Mission
Saturn's Wish is an arts and culture organization dedicated to advancing the artistic and cultural efforts of TGIBIPOC.
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About
Founded through the dreams of centering transgender, gender expansive, and intersex communities of colors in the arts by Xelestial Moreno-Luz: Saturn's Wish is an arts and culture organization dedicated to advancing the artistic and cultural efforts of Transgender, Gender-expansive, and Intersex TGI), and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), with an emphasis on populations of Latin American and Caribbean descent. Through cross-sector and cross-disciplinary approaches, we are transforming the landscape of visual and performing arts and arts and culture as whole. We do this by centering decolonial feminisms, racial, gender, and economic justice through arts education, and financial mobility. We organize for intersectional justice and liberation through transformative dialogue, advocacy, and transnational organizing. We promote dignity and acceptance in educational institutions, the nuclear and secular family, and healthier communities through our values.
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Vision
We saw into the future and TGI people are living in creative abundance. Our community's arts fill the skies. Our names are written in the stars. We envision with our youth, lead with our elders, and transform together. Our communities exist in harmony with one another by holding our complex selves close and dear. The past gave us lessons that we are committed to applying in the present, in our practice, to achieve a marvelous future. We cultivate exclusive spaces for our participants to co-create in our radical incubators. We manifest an alternative dimension in the current arts and culture ecosystem, which remains dominated by cissexist and hetero-patriarchal entities. Let’s live in the future now.
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CEO and Founder
Xelestiál Moreno-Luz is an advocate, cultural worker, socially engaged photographer, and interdisciplinary artist living in San Diego, CA. Her practice is rooted in transnational feminism and explores notions of familial belonging, the politics of memory, and trans/queer visual subjectivity in audacious living practices and necropolitics. She has spent the past ten years working and learning in coalition with community members dedicated to confronting immigrant in-justice, fostering transgender, gender expansive, and intersex liberatory spaces transnationally, expanding the field of queer and transgender art education, increasing access to HIV resources, and building the capacity of her communities. Xelestiál is pursuing an MFA (27') in the Visual Arts department at the University of California, San Diego, where she also holds a BA (20') in Media. She is the founder and CEO of Saturn's Wish, a transgender, non-binary, and intersex arts and culture organization uplifting communities of color in Southern California and beyond.
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Board Chairs
Michaé De La Cuadra: Chair (they/she) navigates this world sin género (without gender). She is a community organizer and artist born and raised in Los Angeles, California (Tongva Land) with familial roots in México and Ecuador. Her work envisions a future free of gender-based violence and imagines the possibilities of a world divesting from our current oppressive systems. She has explored multiple mediums to work toward this world such as visual art, music, building community-led spaces, and engaging in policy change at local, state and national levels.
Yessica Gonzalez Rodriguez: Co-Chair (they/them) is a facilitator, organizer, and digital strategist based on occupied Tiwa Land. Their work lives at the intersection of trans, queer, and migrant justice to see a world without prisons, borders, and binaries. Yessica has spent the last decade building digital campaigns to uplift marginalized communities that are excessively targeted and criminalized. Yessica has a B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles in Gender Studies and is currently pursuing a PhD in American Studies at the University of New Mexico.