Published on Nov 3, 2010
Astraea Director of Programs, Mai Kiang, is being honored by the Stonewall Community Foundation for her contributions to the LGBTI community. A visionary leader and cultural activist, Mai joins 19 other extraordinary women, including Pooja Gehi of Astraea grantee partner Sylvia Rivera Law Project, who will accept their awards on Thursday, December 2, 2010.
For more about the Stonewall Honorees and the December 2nd event, click here.
Mai Kiang is a cultural activist, born and raised under martial-law in Taiwan. Prior to serving as Director of Programs, Mai joined Astraea’s staff as the Associate Director of Grantmaking and is a past member of Astraea’s U.S. Community Funding Panel, a two-term board member and a former board chair. Throughout her career, Mai has worked extensively with grassroots queer, feminist of color, and progressive media groups. She most enjoys bringing communities together to provide a space for sharing and dialogue across disciplines, focuses and strategies. Mai arrived in New York in 1991 to join the staff of Women Make Movies, an independent feminist film distributor, and helped bring about feminist film exhibitions and productions locally and internationally. Later she joined Impact Visuals, a leftist photo cooperative where she was elected to multiple terms as the chief steward to the Oil, Chemical & Atomic Workers’ Union. Mai was also a part of the management team that administered an archive of a million social-issue photographs by over nine hundred photojournalists worldwide. Before joining Astraea’s staff in late 2007, she was the Special Events Manager at New York University. Mai is the co-founder and co-chair of the Institute for Tongzhi Studies, a New York-based group that supports queer artists and scholars in Chinese communities worldwide. She is also the co-convener of the 2007 Lala Institute, the first multi-region Mandarin-speaking LBT leadership camp held in mainland China.
As a staff attorney at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, Pooja Gehi is among the leading legal advocates for social justice for transgender people in NYC. She represents low-income, transgender and intersex people of color in the areas of discrimination, immigration, access to government benefits, proper identification and healthcare. Pooja recently co-authored an article, Unraveling Injustice: Race and Class Impact of Medicaid Exclusions of Transition-Related Health Care for Transgender People with her fabulous co-worker, Gabriel Arkles. http://srlp.org/
