Advocacy & NonProfit Leadership
Writing & Storytelling
Queer Ecologies Art Projects
About
Audacia Ray (they/them) became Executive Director of the New York City Anti-Violence Project (AVP) in 2025; for the previous six years they led the organizing team to advocate for queer survivors’ access to resources beyond the criminal legal system. Previously, they served as founding Executive Director of the Red Umbrella Project, a sex worker advocacy and storytelling group. They have presented their research on anti-LGBTQ hate violence to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, were a key collaborator in writing the most expansive state-level sex work decriminalization bill, and have organized media and storytelling campaigns centering trans people, sex workers, and survivors of violence.
As a queer person whose communities are both historically persistent and currently under threat, Audacia approaches their creative writing and art not as a respite but as a site for survival, metamorphosis, and adaptation. Their short stories are published in The Hopper, Necessary Fiction, Litro Magazine, Superstition Review, and Stone Canoe, and their story “Don’t Look at the Owls” was nominated for a 2025 Best of the Net Award. Their visual art is inspired by nature journaling, field guides, and other forms of ecological study. They combine drawing, watercolor and gouache, nature printing, linocut, and collage to create a series of works on paper about the queer ecology of vernal pools.
As a sex worker rights advocate Dacia was known for leading sex worker rights campaigns as founding director of the Red Umbrella Project, an editor of $pread magazine, host of the monthly storytelling series the Red Umbrella Diaries, and a founding member of Decrim NY. Their first book, Naked on the Internet, was published by Seal Press in 2007 and in that same year they won a Feminist Porn Award for Best Bisexual Scene with their directorial debut The Bi Apple.
Though I don’t center this work today, I remain immensely proud of it and am happy to be in touch with activists who have questions.