Victor Ultra Omni is a PhD candidate in the department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. They earned a Bachelor of Arts in Africana Studies with the highest honors from the Claremont Colleges in Southern California, where they held the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship. They are a graduate fellow in the Emory Graduate Community of Digital Scholarship. Victor’s dissertation tentatively titled The Love Ball: A History of New York City’s House-Structured Ballroom Culture 1972-1992 provides a historical treatment of the origins of ballroom culture. This research has received generous funding by the Society for Visual Anthropology and the Social Science Research Council.
Victor Ultra Omni is a proud father in the iconic worldwide pioneering house of Ultra Omni. They employ methods of oral history to engage pioneers of house-structured ballroom culture. Their work is published or forthcoming in Trans Studies Quarterly (TSQ), Dialogo, The Black Scholar, and the textbook Feminist Studies:Foundations, Conversations, and Applications. They also are a co-founder of Emory’s Black Feminist Working Group.
A current essay “Crystal Labeija, Femme Queens, and the Future of Black Trans Studies” is in issue 10 volume 1 of Transgender Studies Quarterly (TSQ) and can be read here:
