As a queer visual storytelling educator, anticapitalist, coalition-builder and community organizer, Orion [they/him/hers] works at the nexus of social, ecological, and economic crisis to enable holistic perspectives in advancing transcendent justice. They previously have been a delegate to COP21 in Paris and COP22 in Morocco (as well as a mentor for COP23 in Bonn) before co-leading the COP25 delegation. As a Filipinx genderqueer with roots in decolonial lineage, they honor the stories of their ancestors from the Central Valley farmworkers’ movements to indigenous resistance against Spanish empire in their homeland.
Orion is one of the stewards in imagineering the California Allegory project, an epic image and visual storytelling medium for arts activism and education, through the support of the 2015 Brower Youth Award and the 2017-2018 Spiritual Ecology fellowship. This work is in lineage with the Beehive Design Collective, a global arts activist collective that translate movement stories into pen-and-ink fable murals. Recently, Orion has been on a journey of recovering their relationship to the native peoples of their homeland, the Philippines, through being a core member of the Center for Babaylan Studies. Orion believes that what nurtures the heart of collective liberation are the ingredients of inter-identity solidarity, cross-cultural connection and exponential collaboration.
