Omi Salas-SantaCruz

Professional Bio

Omi Salas-SantaCruz is the current President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at Penn State in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. They earned their doctoral degree in education with a designated emphasis in critical theory and gender, women, and sexuality from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master's degree in Sociology from Columbia University. Their intellectual and community work tends to decolonial and Latinx trans feminisms with a focus on trans* and queer of color space-making and resistant practices. They grew up as a trans-fronterizx along the Tijuana-San Diego border which informs their research, teaching, and living practices. Their current project examines questions at the intersections of race, Latinidad, the epistemology of trans inclusion, and practices of being.