sins invalid staff
Image Description: A close-up of a brown-skinned woman with red lipstick and perfectly arched eyebrows, looking into the camera with a playful gaze. They are wearing a grey sweater with stripes of blue and purple, black-rimmed glasses, and their dark hair pulled back from their face.
Patty Berne, Executive Director/Artistic Director
PATRICIA BERNE is the Co-Founder, Executive and Artistic Director of Sins Invalid. Berne’s training in clinical psychology focused on trauma and healing for survivors of interpersonal and state violence. Their professional background includes advocacy for immigrants who seek asylum due to war and torture; community organizing within the Haitian diaspora; international support work for the Guatemalan democratic movement; work with incarcerated youth toward alternatives to the criminal legal system; offering mental health support to survivors of violence; and advocating for LGBTQI and disability perspectives within the field of reproductive genetic technologies. Berne’s experiences as a Japanese-Haitian queer disabled woman provides grounding for her work creating “liberated zones” for marginalized voices. Berne was awarded the Disability Futures Fellowship in 2020 and they are widely recognized for their work to establish the framework and practice of disability justice.
Image Description: A close-up of a fat white Jewish femme wearing light-colored glasses, blue eyeshadow, and burgundy lipstick, with a silver lip ring, and blonde mustache hairs. Their hair is dark and curly, their dress multi-colored, with a tattoo peeking out on their chest. They wear a piece of abalone around their neck.
Nomy Lamm, Creative Director
NOMY LAMM began performing with Sins Invalid in 2008, and since then has been on the Artistic Core (2008-2010), Directed the Artists in Residence Program (2010), and has worked as staff since 2013. Nomy is a multi-media artist, musician, writer and performer who teaches voice lessons and offers creative coaching focused on helping students move through fear and self-judgement to take up space and find equilibrium in radical authenticity (nomyteaches.com). She is an ordained Kohenet (Hebrew Priestess), holds a BA in Multimedia Art and Political Economy from The Evergreen State College, and has an MFA in Fiction from San Francisco State University. She lives on occupied Squaxin/Nisqually/Chehalis land in Olympia, WA with her partner Lisa, their dogs Dandelion and Momma, and their cat Calendula.
Image Description: A young woman with light brown skin and long brown hair, smiling and sitting on a bale of hay surrounded by pumpkins. She wears jeans with fashionably torn knees and a pink t-shirt that says “Save las Tetas” with white handprints on her chest.
Karina Camarena Heredia, Executive Assistant
KARINA CAMARENA HEREDIA is a woman of color working towards her undergraduate degree at the University of California, Berkeley. She loves to dance, read, and play games with her friends. She joined the Sins team this past June as our Executive Assistant. Karina was born in Mexico and migrated to Southern California at the age of five. Over the years she has lost her memories of her birth country and wishes to go back and reconnect with her roots someday. As a 22 year old, she is just starting off her social justice career with special interests in Disability Justice, Reproductive Justice, and Immigration issues.
Image description: a Black trans person in a green, gold, and teal collarless button up short sleeve shirt looks directly at the camera. He wears a dangly earring in his right ear. He is not smiling. He has a curly afro and a fade. Behind him there is a microwave on a white countertop, and some framed pink postcards.
Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, Social Media and Community Engagement Specialist
CYREE JARELLE JOHNSON is a poet and writer from Piscataway, New Jersey. SLINGSHOT, his debut poetry collection, was published by Nightboat Books in 2019 and won the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry. He is a Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow with Poetry Foundation and the inaugural Poet in Residence at Brooklyn Public Library.
Image Description: A sweet-faced white Jewish nonbinary trans person with short hair, sitting in a wooden chair in a luscious garden space with California poppies in the foreground. They are wearing a grey argyle sweater, grey pants and silvery sneakers, with a furry little light brown dog on their lap.
Mordecai Cohen Ettinger, Development Director
MORDECAI COHEN ETTINGER has over 25 years experience as a multi-sector social justice activist and organizer, holistic healer, fundraiser, radical scholar, and educator. Mordecai is the Founding Director of the Health Justice Commons, and co-founded the TGI Justice Project. He is adjunct faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies where he teaches critical science, technology, and medicine studies. Schooled by years of movement work, and trained in Somatic Experiencing, Reiki and Cranial Sacral therapy, they have studied with Dr. Peter Levine, founder of Somatic Experiencing and Dr. Bessel van der Kolk. Mordecai is crip, queer and trans/ non-binary. He is a survivor of radiation poisoning and what is designated by the UN to be medical torture. They are here for advancing disability justice for our futures to be possible.
Image Description: A light brown-skinned femme gazing into the camera, two fingers touching the side of their face. They are wearing a denim jacket decorated with glittering purple grapes, blue-rimmed glasses, and a silver star necklace. A beaded orange Wixárika earring peaks out from beneath their curly black hair and a black tattoo of flowers decorates their collar. The curling edges of green leaves are visible in the foreground.
Letícia Robles-Tovar, Administrative and Development Associate
LETICIA “Lettie” ROBLES-TOVAR is a nepantlere aspiring cultural worker who aims to focus their work on abolition, radical decolonization, environmental justice, and collective healing. Their ancestors and love for Mother Earth--along with growing up in a rural community--are at the root of their commitment towards collective liberation and being a good steward to the Earth. They hold a BA in political science from the University of Berkeley, California. They spend their free time learning the secret language of plants and the histories of rocks.
Image Description: A white Latinx Jewish person with long brown hair in a braid, streaked with silver. They are wearing light-colored shades with blue frames, and have multiple facial piercings. They are sitting on rocky earth, looking up toward the camera, wearing a sleeveless Festival for all Skid Row Artists t-shirt and dusty rose-colored pants. A tattoo of a flowering succulent is visible peeking out of their shirt on their left shoulder.
Jen/Eleana Hofer, Language Justice Coordinator
JEN/ELEANA HOFER is a poet, translator, social justice interpreter, teacher, facilitator, urban cyclist, and co-founder of the language justice and language experimentation collaborative Antena Aire (2010-2020). They publish poems, translations, and visual-textual works with numerous small independent presses and in various DIY/DIT incarnations, and have received support in many forms from many entities, including CantoMundo, the Academy of American Poets, the City of Los Angeles, the NEA, and PEN American Center. Jen/Eleana lives on unceded Tongva land in Los Angeles and identifies as a queer white Latinx/Argentinean Jewish BDS supporter who grew up mostly monolingual in a bilingual/bicultural family. They passionately believe in language justice practices as a powerful intersection between healing, solidarity work, and the transformative possibilities of language. More information: www.channeltransmitrepeat.com.
Image Description: A Latina woman with long dark hair wearing a shirt that says “Piss On Pity,” with red lips and a huge smile. She is seated in her wheelchair in front of a fence with a large sign or vehicle behind her. There is a red strap around her waist, connected to something off-screen. She appears to be at a protest or direct action.
Maria Palacios, Spanish Language Communities Outreach Specialist
MARIA PALACIOS, also known as the “Goddess on Wheels,” is a poet, author, spoken word performer, and workshop facilitator who has performed with Sins Invalid since 2007. Maria has published several books including Poetic Confessions Volumes I & II, Dressing Skeletons, and Criptionary. Maria’s work echoes the resilience of crip survival, through the lens of her own experience as a Latina, immigrant, disabled woman living in Houston.
Image Description: A light-skinned bearded and balding femme wears deep purple rectangular glasses, a heather grey shirt and glass spiral earrings on a rooftop with a wall, grey and brown buildings, and treetops in the background. They aren't quite smiling or solemn but look pleased.
Lorenzo Van Ness, Disability Justice Trainer
LORENZO VAN NESS is a queer trans Dominican lifelong New Yorker. While they have worked primarily in the legal field as a non-attorney, they have organized in NYC since 2006 around issues of language access, police accountability, community safety, fighting poverty, leadership development and QTPOC liberation. They’re passionate about building access for people pushed to the margins, supporting community and continuously growing their knowledge.