ZACKIE ACHMAT
Zackie Achmat is founder and former chairman of South Africa’s Treatment Action Campaign (TAC). Recognized as the one of the most important social movements in post-apartheid South Africa, the TAC has held government accountable for health care service delivery, campaigned against official AIDS denialism, challenged the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies to make treatment more affordable and cultivated community leadership on HIV and AIDS. In developing TAC’s direct action tactics, Achmat drew from his experiences as an anti-apartheid and gay-rights activist, starting at age 14. In the early 1990s, he founded the National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality and co-directed Apostles of Civilised Vice, a groundbreaking documentary film about South African LGBT history. He directed the AIDS Law Project at the University of the Witwatersrand before founding the TAC with 10 other activists in 1998. In 2008, he jointly founded the Social Justice Coalition to promote the rights of South Africa’s marginalized communities. He is also the current director of the Centre for Law & Social Justice in Cape Town. Achmat’s honors include a Desmond Tutu Leadership Award, the Nelson Mandela Award for Health and Human Rights and a fellowship from Ashoka: Innovators for the Public.

SUNIL GUPTA
Born in New Delhi, and growing up watching Bollywood films in all their glorious color, Sunil Gupta moved to Montreal with his family in the late 1960s, where his interest in photography began to develop. From the mid-1970s he lived in New York, where he studied photography at the New School for Social Research under Lisette Model. At the end of the 1970s, he moved to London to continue his studies at the Royal College of Art. He was involved in the founding of Autograph (Association of Black Photographers) in London, and he also set up the Organisation for Visual Arts (OVA) to promote a greater understanding of questions regarding cultural differences and their incorporation into the sphere of fine art. His work has been exhibited around the world and is currently on display at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography in the exhibition, "Love's Body 2" on AIDS and photography. His next book Queer: Sunil Gupta will be published by Prestel in April 2011. He works as a photographer, writer and curator out of London and Delhi. He is a member of Nigah, a queer collective in Delhi.

JIN HARITAWORN
Jin Haritaworn is Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies Fellow and works intellectually, politically and creatively at the nexus of critical race, gender and sexuality theory. Following doctoral work on cultural and biographical representations of Thainess, mixed race, and queer diaspora in Britain and Germany (forthcoming with Ashgate), Jin's current project deals with homonationalist travels in Europe and trans-Atlantically (contracted as part of the Pluto series Decolonial Studies, Postcolonial Horizons). Edited volumes include a special issue on polyamory and non-monogamies with Sexualities Journal, a forthcoming cluster on metonymies between women's and gay rights discourses in the war on terror and backlash against multiculturalism in European Journal of Women's Studies, and a collection on Queer Necropolitics edited with Adi Kuntsman and Silvia Posocco. Articles have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Social Justice, European Journal of Cultural Studies, and Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, as well as book collections such as Out of Place and Decolonising European Sociology. Jin's interests further include transnational sexuality studies, neoliberal citizenship, feminist/queer/trans of colour theories, affect and intimate publics, transgression and assimilation, trafficking critiques, and multi-issue theorising.

GHADIR HILMI
Ghadir Hilmi is a feminist Palestinian queer activist. She joined Aswat's staff in 2008 as an organizational development and public relations coordinator, and represents Aswat in local and global events to voice the intersections of the Palestinian-Feminist-Queer struggle, which managed to unite the feminism, queer, occupation and resistance into one monumental struggle for equality and freedom. 

Aswat- Palestinian Gay Women
Aswat is one of the pioneering feminist organizations to address the needs of Queer Palestinian women in Israel and the Occupied Territories. In 2003, Aswat was established to provide safe, supportive and empowering spaces for Palestinian women to address our personal, social and political struggles as a multi-oppressed group. Firstly, as Palestinians - a national indigenous minority living inside Israel facing both institutionalized discrimination and casual racism - we are part of the national struggle for equal human and civil rights. Secondly, as women we face oppression in the two societies in which we live – despite their outward differences both Israeli and Palestinian society are characterized by a deep-rooted patriarchal attitude towards women – and thus we are part of the global feminist struggle for equality with men. Finally, as queer women in a wider hetero-normative culture that is often extremely homophobic, we struggle against discrimination and fight to promote a queer discourse that works to create a more diverse and inclusive Palestinian society.