Lore Espinoza (they/she)

Informed by their own experiences as a queer international student at Middlebury College, Lore Espinoza focused their professional interests towards fostering better practices within academic institutions and creating programs that advanced the needs of multicultural student populations. Understanding the role physical and mental health play in people’s lives and the specific challenges faced by LGBTQ populations to access health services, Lore completed a Graduate Certificate in LGBT Health, Policy, and Practice at the George Washington University in 2015. As part of their capstone project, Lore designed and implemented cost-free workshops for Bogota’s LGBT community and examined the healthcare access barriers experienced by transgender homeless women in the city. Time and again Lore has excelled at developing culturally sensitive workshops on gender, sexuality, and anti-racist practices, creating safe learning spaces, and grounding DEI concepts to multicultural and transnational contexts. Most recently, Lore received an Erasmus Mundus Scholarship to complete a Master’s Degree in Women and Gender Studies; and they graduated with Distinction in October 2020. For their master’s thesis, Lore’s passion for health and education, combined with their transnational experiences as a fat womyn, let them to engage in an autoethnographic queer and decolonial practice that sought to destabilize traditional narratives of fatness, while understanding how race, class, and religion have played a role in said narratives.