We are Current Tides, a creative partnership that collects and shares stories in order to sustain visionary dialogue.

We are a two-person team working towards creative healing spaces where transformation might be possible through digital media, creative performances, workshops, and gatherings.

We direct oral history/herstory projects, offer talks and presentations about the function of collecting stories, and engage in consultations about re-visioning community based projects around social change and storytelling.

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Tei Okamoto has, for two decades, been part of a progressive, holistic health movement which seeks to understand the interconnections between health disparities and class, race, gender, and sexuality. Tei was part of a research team at UCLA which addressed issues of Child Sexual Abuse and HIV among women of color, and then went on to join the UCSF Center for AIDS Prevention Studies TRANS project, where Tei advocated for alternative sentencing for trans people and lead the substance use pre-treatment program. Tei was also part of the management team at Tenderloin Health in San Francisco, which served the health needs of some of the most hard to reach, highest risk, homeless Trans and queer populations in the city.  Tei then moved to New York and managed the opening of the Trans* Health Clinic, a health clinic devoted specifically to the needs of API and Trans* of color populations in New York City.

Tei Okamoto is a fellow for the Rockwood Leadership Institute and New York Out In Front in 2013, and former Board Chair for Queers for Economic Justice. Tei currently serves on the Center for LGBTQ Studies Board of Directors and is the Vice Chair of the HIV Prevention Group for New York City. Included in the 2013 Trans 100 List,  Tei has shown unwavering and ongoing commitments to transgender issues.

In addition to the Love and Affection Project, Tei is currently working a second oral history project: The AIDS Epidemic and House Music: Twenty Years of Children of Color at Church, explores how the house music scene provided an alternative space of community and healing for queers of color in the midst of the devastation of the AIDS epidemic in the early to mid 1990s. Tei is also the founder of p.i.s.s. :Public Intellectual SpaceS, which curates various political/intellectual/activist queer events. Recent panels include: Queer Gen(d)erations: How to Leave a Legacy in a Broke-Ass Economy (Denise Infinity of House of Infifnity, Cecilia Gentili, J Jack Halberstam, Tanya Saunders and Imani Uzuri); Remembering Marlon Riggs (Robert Reid-Pharr, Jackie Nassy Brown, Gayatri Gopinath, Kenyon Farrow); and Neon Baby: Juan Extravaganza and Queer Latino Performance (Arnaldo Cruz-Malave, Jorge B. Merced and Gayatri Gopinath).

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Angelique V. Nixon is a writer, artist, teacher, scholar, activist, and poet — born and raised in The Bahamas. She is committed to movements for social and environmental justice, gender, racial, and sexual equality, and radical social change. Her work as a scholar, cultural critic, and poet has been published widely in academic and literary journals, as well as critical online spaces such as ARC Magazine’s blog, CODE RED for Gender Justice, Groundation Grenada, and The Feminist Wire. She is author of the poetry and art collection Saltwater Healing – A Myth Memoir and Poems published by Poinciana Paper Press, in a letterpress cover, hand-bound, limited edition. And she is co-editor of the online multi-media collection Theorizing Homophobias in the Caribbean: Complexities of Place, Desire and Belonging. Angelique earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of Florida, where she specialized in Caribbean and postcolonial studies, as well as women’s studies and gender research. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Africana Studies at New York University, where she engaged in advanced research on migration and immigrations. She teaches and writes about Caribbean and postcolonial studies, African diaspora literatures and cultures, feminist and postcolonial theories, and gender and sexuality studies. She is currently a Fulbright Scholar at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies, The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine in Trinidad and Tobago.

Angelique has participated in several oral history/herstory and interview-based community projects, including her own fieldwork in Jamaica and The Bahamas, as well as the Race and Change Project in Belle Glade, Florida. Currently, in addition to the Love and Affection Project, she is working on the Attica Prison Project through Critical Resistance New York. Furthermore, Angelique is deeply invested in grassroots activism and community organizing; she has worked with a number of organizations, including Critical Resistance, the Audre Lorde Project, and the AIDS Service Center in NYC. She is on the core organizing team of the grassroots healing collective Ayiti Resurrect—which has successfully led three delegations of artists, community builders, and healers (in collaboration with local Haitian organizations) to work in Leogane, Haiti, focusing on women’s empowerment, sustainability, education, and health. Also, she is co-chair of the Caribbean IRN (International Resource Network), which connects activists, community-based researchers, teachers, and artists who do work on diverse genders and sexualities. Angelique serves on the working board of the Center for LGBTQ Studies at City University of New York. Additionally, she is on a New York based, curriculum building team with fellow educators and activists developing a social and environmental justice curriculum for high school and college (based on the award-winning multi-media performance Hurricane Season) using popular education models. And she is on the advisory board of the Naniki project – a multimedia network and interdisciplinary collaboration working towards Caribbean sustainability through creative exchange, education, and environmental and social development projects. She has been invited to present her work at numerous conferences and universities around the world, and she has also facilitated/organized many community events and workshops. Angelique works through her art, writing, and community work to disrupt silences, challenge systems of oppression, and carve spaces for resistance and desire.