Photo by Jade Wilson
Educators
Kayla Coleman
Meet one of the artists, disruptors, educators, groundbreakers, innovators, and storytellers who all helped make the world a better place for LGBTQ+ people.
In January 2022, art historian, curator, educator, and writer Kayla Coleman became the director of North Carolina’s VAE Raleigh, a nonprofit organization that produces, funds, and exhibits socially engaged art through community collaboration. The first Black woman to run VAE Raleigh in its 43-year history, Coleman describes her work as “specializing in post-colonialism and dismantling the matrix of domination.”
Under Coleman’s leadership, VAE Raleigh has curated exhibits on the Black family home, healing and autonomy, southern QTBIPOC resistance, and queer Appalachia. Before joining VAE Raleigh, Coleman was the deputy director of Percent for Art for New York City, where she commissioned hundreds of site-specific projects by diverse artists.
But things weren’t always easy for Coleman, who was outed when she was very young. “The largest obstacle I have faced [in my life] is being my authentic self despite family expectations and pressures of the world,” she says. “I was fortunate to know myself deeply at a time where others were just figuring it out, and I stayed the course even when I felt alone, and now things are better than I ever could have imagined.”
Coleman was recently named executive director of the New England Museum Association, where she hopes to create “inroads in diversity, equity, and inclusion.” While making the art world more diverse, equitable, and inclusive is a big part of her work, she also emphasizes the importance of showing up during this political time.
“The LGBTQIA+ community is multifaceted and enduring, but with the current political climate, our rights are being repealed at every turn,” says Coleman. “Be active in your community, exercise your voting rights at all levels, practice mutual aid, and organize! People deserve the right to live their authentic lives.”
Educators
Maeve DuVally
Meet one of the artists, disruptors, educators, groundbreakers, innovators, and storytellers who all helped make the world a better place for LGBTQ+ people.
Courtesy of Maeve DuVally
For 18 years, Maeve DuVally worked at Goldman Sachs as the managing director of communications. But it wasn’t until 15 years into her role that DuVally was able to enter the workplace as herself: a “transgender woman who had thought herself a man for the first 56 years of her life.”
It was 2019 when she first introduced herself to her colleagues as Maeve DuVally. The decision to come out at work had been sparked by a panel sponsored by Goldman Sachs’s LGBTQ+ affinity network on how to make the workplace more comfortable for transgender people. DuVally first realized she was trans in October 2018, after becoming sober in January of the same year.
“Getting sober in 2018 was the most harrowing and difficult accomplishment of my life so far. I believe I would be dead if I hadn’t succeeded or at the very least, I would not have realized who I am and there would be no Maeve,” says DuVally. “I had to go to the brink and look into the abyss of death before making a decision to live sober.”
A few months after coming out at Goldman, DuVally was the subject of a New York Times article, which profiled her first few days of being out at work. In 2022 she left Goldman to consult for corporations and other organizations on communications strategy and diversity, equity, and inclusion. In 2023 she published a memoir called Maeve Rising, which chronicles her struggles with alcohol and her very public coming-out.