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
Caribbean Equality Project
est. Queens, NY, 2015
Theo Brown, Live Pridefully, 2021
Digital Print
Photography by Christian Thane
Courtesy of Caribbean Equality Project
Theo Brown (he/him/his) is a Jamaican-born resident of the D.C./Maryland/Virginia (DMV) area, an avid HIV/AIDS activist, passionate volunteer, and advisor for organizations and programs across the greater metropolitan area. Serving as the Public Relations Liaison since 2015 and Board of Directors Chair (2023) of the Caribbean Equality Project, Theo has been responsible for communications, training volunteers, and curating the Caribbean Equality Project's rich culture-shifting history of activism, racial justice, immigration reform, and legislative advocacy.
As a Queer immigrant, Theo's immigration journey has taken him from starting as an international student to being undocumented shortly before becoming a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) beneficiary. The DACA status facilitated employment, economic, and continued educational opportunities, leading Theo to obtain a permanent residency during his intriguing tenure in the United States.
Theo has been a devoted sexual health advocate for safer sex practices throughout a diverse population, most recently narrowing his scope to the Caribbean LGBTQ+ Community's use of PrEP and PEP. His activism has included reaching out to and engaging with students and the youth populations through innovative ways, such as Project (RED), which aimed to promote testing and becoming knowledgeable of one's status (for all STDs/STIs). Theo continues to fight for intersectional gender and racial representation of people impacted by HIV/AIDS, explicitly centering the Caribbean LGBTQ+ diaspora.
Theo is a voting rights advocate and promotes voter education and civic engagement through Caribbean Equality Project's "Mash-Up De Vote," a culture-specific non-partisan political power-building voter education campaign. His political organizing and outreach advocacy focuses on civic participation within the Caribbean and LGBTQ+ immigrant communities in the U.S.
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
