California-based artist Katie Gilmartin’s checkered past includes stints as a buoyant union organiser, bona fide sex researcher, and deeply engaged college professor. She attended Oberlin College and Yale Graduate School, where her doctoral research entailed interviewing older lesbians about their lives in the 1940s, 50s and 60s.

For over a decade she taught cultural studies with an emphasis on the histories of gender, sexuality, and intersectionality. On an urgent quest to find the roots of her creativity she took a printmaking class, became utterly smitten with the medium, and abandoned academia to become a community-based artist, teacher, and writer. Along the way she cofounded City Art Cooperative Gallery, a still-thriving artspace on Valencia Street in San Francisco, and launched the Queer Ancestors Project, devoted to forging sturdy relationships between young queer and trans artists and their ancestors.

Katie now teaches printmaking, and runs the Queer Ancestors Project at Chrysalis Studio in San Francisco’s South of Market Cultural Center. Her illustrated novel, Blackmail, My Love, won Lambda and Indiefab Awards. Her second novel. Thrill Spot, is a fictional account of an actual 1954 raid on a lesbian/trans bar in San Francisco’s North Beach.

Katie Gilmartin’s website can be found here.