Queer Spa Network (QSN) is back again with our virtual spa designing workshop. Participants will work in teams and co-create a spa space that is accessible, welcomes people of all genders, and honors consent practices and bodily autonomy. We will have facilitated imagining sessions and opportunities to exchange stories and resources. Dream anything you want in our virtual space, from a mud bath for trans-mermaids, a slime dungeon, or the blueprint for your future Queer farm commune.
This event will take place virtually on GatherTown, an online social space in which people can get together, prototype their own virtual environments, and have conversations with other participants. Because GatherTown allows the construction of multiple rooms and participants can only converse when they are proximate to each other, we can facilitate multiple conversations in the same event—similar to an in-person event. This event will only be accessible on a laptop or desktop computer. Please for access requests.
Participant Bios:
LEO ALAS (b. 1995) is a contemporary multi-disciplinary artist exploring themes around care work and grief, through a Marxist-Feminist lens. Their practice moves through and along boundaries of intimacy, the body, and community sculpture. It takes on journeys into world building and Queer political imagination, exploring what is possible, what is potent, and what is beautiful, in an effort to find healing and joy in late-stage capitalism.
Carol Zou (b. 1988, Hepu, China) is a U.S. based community-engaged artist whose work engages themes of spatial justice, public pedagogy, and intercultural connection in multiracial neighborhoods. They engage durational, process-based collaborations with community contributors using mediums of craft, media arts, and public installation. As a counterpoint to their collaborative work, their writing and conceptual works interrogate questions of conflict and antagonism constitutive of the public sphere. Their style of multi-sector collaboration gestures to an interdisciplinary, liberatory future in which we are all hopefully a little more undisciplined.
Mel Liu (they/them/theirs) grew up and is currently based in Tovaangar (Los Angeles Basin). As a non-binary, queer Chinese Indonesian American cultural organizer they are committed to supporting grassroot movements led by communities that are advancing racial, gender, housing, economic, and disability justice. They have over a decade of community-centered collaborative work and creative projects through creative storytelling practices. Mel studied art history, film, urban planning, and ethnomusicology at the University of California Los Angeles.
Lindsey Morris (they/them) is a Los Angeles-based visual artist, grief tender, and urban planner dedicated to fostering space for collective grief tending and community death care. Certified as a Death Doula through DeathWives, Lindsey combines creative expression with trauma-informed care to navigate life’s most challenging transitions. They draw on training from the Thrivance Project’s Designing with Dignity program and UCLA’s Urban Humanities Initiative to approach their work with cultural sensitivity, place-based care, and an interdisciplinary lens. Lindsey’s workshops and installations explore grief as a multifaceted experience, often weaving together ritual, movement, and natural materials to create spaces for healing and connection.
Ada Runge is a queer writer, researcher, and community care worker rooted in rest, joy, and collective liberation. A former sex educator and current facilitator in the movement space, she creates trainings and collaborates with grassroots organizations across the country to support statewide and local campaigns for transformative change. Ada’s work blends trauma-informed facilitation with narrative healing, using storytelling, reflection, and meaning-making as tools for collective growth. With a background in youth advocacy, mental health, digital strategy, herbalism, and plant care, they bring a multidisciplinary approach to liberatory work.
Andy Cao aspires to become one of those old men who spend their days working the land and teaching wanderers life wisdom by pointing to the river. In the meantime, they farm between two freeways and introduce high schoolers to proper lifting and tomato meditation. Supposedly, they were once a working artist?
Forever Andeva (she/her) is an artist, music lover, star and navel gazer.
This program is organized by Queer Spa Network (QSN) as part of Circa: Queer Histories Festival 2025, presented by One Institute.
Queer Spa Network is a group of autonomous Queer artists and healers invested in rest, healing, and pleasure for our communities. We are brought together to exchange knowledge, collaborate on projects that serve our values, and build empathetic communal relationships with our bodies, the land and waters, and one another.