Roy Pérez is an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies and Critical Gender Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His scholarly writing appears in Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value (2020), Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (2017), Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States (2017), and elsewhere. His work has received awards from the CUNY Center for LGBTQ Studies, the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is currently working on a book entitled So Close: Race, Sex and the Proximal that explores the use of closeness during periods of estrangement by queer artists of color. His residency at Dorland Mountain Arts is supported by the Society of Hellman Fellows at UC San Diego.