Image: Installation view, Live Pridefully: Love and Resilience within Pandemics, Queens Museum. Photo credit: Hai Zhang.
LIVE PRIDEFULLY: Love and Resilience within Pandemics - The Exhibition
Photo by TrinCity Photos, 2022.
Caribbean Equality Project
est. Queens, NY, 2015
Tannuja Devi Rozario, Live Pridefully, 2021
Digital Print
Photography by Christian Thane
Courtesy of Caribbean Equality Project
Dr. Tannuja Devi Rozario (she/her/hers) is an Indo-Guyanese organizer with South Queens Women's March and New York Birth Control Access Project, and the Associate Director of Research At Everytown for Gun Safety, which she conducts research on understanding the causes of gun violence to develop evidence-based solutions to America’s gun violence crisis. She is also an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Her dissertation focused on the reproductive health experiences of Indo-Caribbeans. She has conducted interviews with individuals from Trinidad and Guyana who traveled to New York for reproductive health services, and guided participant observations at events and workshops hosted by community-based organizations in New York that focus on reproductive injustice and gender-based violence.
Her passion for advocacy stems from her experience in Guyana as a child, where she witnessed the impact of gendered injustice. As an Indo-Caribbean immigrant, her research stems from observing inequalities that appear across systems of oppression on a national and global level. This continues to drive her work toward dismantling gender norms that maintain systems of power and prevent marginalized people from becoming leaders that effect change.
Tannuja is a Founding Board Member of South Queen’s Women’s March, a gender justice organization based in South Queens, New York, that empowers women and gender-expansive people. She is also a Board Member of the New York Birth Control Access Project. Her research has been published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Social Science & Medicine, and is forthcoming in Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism.
About Live Pridefully: Love and Resilience within Pandemics:
As part of the Queens Museum’s Year of Uncertainty, the Caribbean Equality Project is proud to present Live Pridefully: Love and Resilience within Pandemics, an interdisciplinary exhibition that celebrates queer and trans Caribbean resilience through a racial justice lens, while fostering critical conversations related to pride, migration, surviving colliding pandemics, and coming out narratives. Caribbean diasporic immigrant rights, gender justice, and trans rights advocates live at the intersections of outdated immigration policies, anti-black violence, racism, homophobia, transphobia, gender-based violence, xenophobia, and misogyny in the United States and throughout the Caribbean region.
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, queer and trans immigrants of color have lived in a constant state of fear and isolation, from food insecurity, a lack of access to equitable healthcare, and rising rates of anti-Asian violence and police brutality against Black bodies. In a year of uncertainty, Live Pridefully reimagines and affirms undocumented Black and Brown LGBTQ+ immigrants and asylum seekers as essential workers, creatives, and contributors to the cultural diversity of New York City.
This interdisciplinary exhibition was originally presented at the Queens Museum from December 4, 2021, to March 6, 2022, as part of the Year of Uncertainty. In 2022, it was transformed into an outdoor photography exhibition shown at Brooklyn Bridge Park during the 2022 Photoville Festival. In 2023, this historic exhibition becomes the first public art installation by Photoville in Richmond Hill, Queens -home to predominantly Indo-Caribbean and South-Asian immigrant communities where Caribbean Equality Project is based.
Curated by Mohamed Q. Amin, portraits of Caribbean LGBTQ+ immigrants anchor the exhibition, with oral Afro and Indo-Caribbean migrant histories and stories driven to construct healing through storytelling, embodied resilience, and intersectional dialogue on postcolonial belonging, anti-Asian hate violence, and Black trans liberation.
Photography: Christian Thane
Visual Director: Richard Ramsundar, Creative Director, The World is Rich Productions
