2020 speakers
Every year we are joined by 15-20 speakers that are leading movements in reproductive health. They are advocates in this space and are passionate about spreading the awareness around bodies, birth, parenting and autonomy.
DR. AMNA DERMISH
Dr. Amna Dermish is a board certified OB/GYN who specializes in reproductive health and family planning. She received her medical degree from the University of Colorado School of Medicine followed by residency training in Obstetrics and Gynecology at Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. She completed a Fellowship in Family Planning and received a Master’s degree in Clinical Investigation at the University of Utah. Dr. Dermish is currently the Regional Medical Director for Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas where she also oversees their transgender healthcare services, including gender affirming hormone therapy. Her clinical and research interests are in addressing barriers to comprehensive reproductive and sexual health.
TRYSTAN REESE
Trystan Reese sprang into the public consciousness in 2017 when he decided to tell his trans pregnancy story in the mainstream media. He is proud to have expanded the public conversation about trans reproductive justice, queer families, and what it means to be a father. He regularly trains birthworkers on the details of trans and nonbinary pregnancy, and provides support to trans gestational parents across the globe. He is also the Director of Family Formation at Family Equality Council, a national nonprofit dedicated to supporting LGBTQ+ families and those who wish to form them.
@biffandi
JEN SARDUY
Jen Sarduy is a black woman, parent, spouse, and community organizer. Her life's goal is to leave the places she inhabits more whole than she found them. Working at the intersection of race, and maternal health, she works to improve outcomes through community organizing, implicit bias training, and grassroots power building. She works to see the day when the joy found in movement work can be shared by our most marginalized neighbors.
@bazinga616 / @rebirthequity
MARTHA PINCOFFS
Martha Pincoffs is a strategist and co-founder of Waking Giants, a social impact company that builds tools for engagement. She has special powers when it comes to connecting ideas, people, and institutions with winning outcomes. Her guiding principle is authenticity. No tricks are needed when space is made for the message to come through. She has a core belief that the world will be a better place when we can all live our truth. She is on a mission to help people, campaigns, companies, and non-profits find that place. She is the founder of Hot Dang, a vegetarian burger that can be found in stores across the country. Martha is curious about people and the world and blends the lines between work, play, activism and family. She and her wife have the two cutest kids in the world and are experts in both tacos and sushi.
@forthegoodfight
JENNA BROWN
Unapologetically queer, proudly radical, and undeniably articulate, Jenna Brown (they/them/theirs) of Love Over Fear Wellness and Birth, has their eyes set on a future that is brighter, weirder, and more accepting. As a full-spectrum doula and community educator, Jenna has served many families and individuals through both growth and loss, taught countless community classes and workshops, been a guest on several podcasts, a guest lecturer in Villanova University’s Nursing Program, contributed to doula training programs, and facilitated modules of yoga teacher training programs. Jenna is a transmasculine non-binary person, and sees their queer identity and its related experiences as strengths in their work, which is - at its core - all about seeing and caring for people as they move through transitions. In 2019 Jenna self-published Queer + Pregnant, a pregnancy journal and workbook intended for use by gestational parents whose experiences and identities transcend the cis-heteronormative narrative of family-building; and released Breathe Easy, a video series of movement, breath, and rest practices for the childbearing year(s). They also host a virtual support group for queer folks who are trying to conceive, pregnant, or new parents. Currently, Jenna is living and practicing in Austin, TX, as well as taking clients and mentees online.
@loveoverfearwellness
M. CARMEN LANE
M. Carmen Lane is a two:spirit African-American and Haudenosaunee (Mohawk/Tuscarora) artist, writer and facilitator living in Cleveland, Ohio. Lane’s work ranges from experiential educator to diversity practitioner to organizational systems consultant to experimental artist—all of it integrates ancestry, legacy, and spirituality; pursues expansion, experimentation, and play. Lane is founder and director of ATNSC: Center for Healing & Creative Leadership atnsc.org, an urban retreat center and social practice experiment in holistic health, leadership development, Indigenous arts and culture and the Akhsótha Gallery located in the historic Buckeye-Shaker neighborhood. Lane’s work has been published in numerous journals and anthologies including the Yellow Medicine Review, Red Ink Magazine, Anomaly, and the Lambda Literary Award-nominated Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two Spirit Literatures. Lane’s first collection of poetry is Calling Out After Slaughter (2015). Lane has exhibited work during the FRONT 2018 triennial group show by Michael Rakowitz, A Color Removed at SPACES Gallery and at EFA Project Space’s Spring 2019 exhibition In The Presence of Absence. Lane was a 2018 Creative Fusion artist-in-residence and recipient of the 2019 Room In The House artist residency at the historic Karamu theatre.
@m_crmnlne | @atnsc
SABIA WADE
Sabia Wade is a Radical Doula, Certified Doula Business Coach and Reproductive Justice Advocate. In 2015, her doula journey began as a volunteer doula with The Prison Birth Project. In her role as a volunteer doula, she assisted incarcerated and formerly incarcerated parents, as well as parents in recovery, for two years. In these two years, she gained knowledge not only about birth but also about topics such as obstetric violence and reproductive justice. She's taken this knowledge and infused it in her practice as a professional doula in San Diego and supports all families regardless of race, culture and sexual orientation.
Due to her personal success as a doula, she has been able to educate and improve the birth outcomes of the clients that she serves, while coaching doulas on the best ways to create a sustainable business to serve the families that need us. She is also continuing to bring attention to reproductive health disparities in America by providing amazing and selfless volunteer doulas to under-served families in Southeast San Diego through her nonprofit organization, For The Village.
@theblackdoula
LINDSEY MATHEWS
Lindsey Mathews is a doctor of chiropractic, birth doula, NLP practitioner, and strength and conditioning coach. Lindsey started BIRTHFIT in 2011 as a blog with a deep desire to support and educate all humans throughout the motherhood transition. BIRTHFIT started expanding in 2014 and since then has doubled in size each year. BIRTHFIT is a movement!
Lindsey currently calls Austin, TX home where she takes on personal training, doula clients, postpartum healing sessions, and teaches the BIRTHFIT Prenatal Series. Lindsey's roster and schedule fills up in advance, so be sure to visit lindseykmathews.com to schedule your consult or session with her. Lindsey is a passionate believer in magic and love, views every obstacle as an opportunity to learn, and is a woman in pursuit of truth through food, travel, and relationships.
@lindsey_k_mathews
CHEYENNE VARNER
Cheyenne Varner is a certified professional birth doula, trained by toLabor, Ancient Song, and Doula Trainings International (DTI) and certified by DTI. She runs The Educated Birth, an online shop of birth educational materials, including Everyday Birth Magazine. Cheyenne's work revolves around intentionally centering the images and stories of parents of color, people who identify as LGBTQIA+, people of many body sizes, and more. She believes it shouldn't be as difficult as it is to find materials — educational, entertaining, or both — that show us all authentically.
@theeducatedbirth
JADA SHAPIRO
Jada Shapiro is a maternal health expert and the founder of boober, a femtech startup where expectant & new parents find expert, in-person pregnancy to postpartum care providers, like doulas and lactation consultants. She also founded Birth Day Presence, NYC’s most trusted source for doulas and childbirth classes which has supported over 20,000 expectant and new parents since 2002. She is a birth and postpartum doula, childbirth educator, lactation counselor, birth photographer, mother and step-mother. Jada has assisted hundreds of births for first-time parents, A-list celebrities, and everyone in between. She has worked with thousands of families in the classroom and advises leading actors about childbirth and breastfeeding for major films, most recently consulting to Jennifer Lawrence in Darren Aronofsky's latest feature. A media expert on pregnancy, childbirth, postpartum, lactation, and newborn parenting, Jada is regularly sought out for insight and information by major media outlets.
@getboober
TAYLOR HUNTLEY
Taylor Huntley is a Black millennial mother, a wife, a birthworker and an advocate for accessible and affordable childcare. She is the creative founder of Mama Mangos Care, a platform for honest and mindful motherhood and spiritual self care practices. She works at Mama Sana Vibrant Woman as a program coordinator and group facilitator and is a self-studied community herbalist by night. She believes people thrive when supported by birth workers and community advocates that look like them and have shared life experiences. Taylor is a trained birth companion, postpartum doula and lactation educator. Her lifework centers around supporting womxn and their families wholistically and she believes an identified need is accessible, affordable and safe childcare.
@mamamangos
DR. STEPHANIE MITCHELL DNP, CNM
Stephanie is a certified nurse midwife of three years who currently practices full scope midwifery in a private collaborative practice in Providence Rhode Island and at a Hospital in Boston. Her doctoral research and capstone, addressed low-intervention labor and birth in a hospital setting, with the use of intermittent auscultation as the standard of care for low-risk laboring people. She is also crediting for the development and institution of a birth preferences tool as a method of patient engagement in which, physiologic preferences are brought back into labor and birth spaces which have slowly medicalized over the last 50 years, bringing along with it, abysmal outcomes.
Starting in 2003, Stephanie has primarily spent her time functioning in the capacity as a pediatric nurse, and then a labor and delivery nurse, and lastly as a midwife in tertiary-care teaching facilities. A consumer of healthcare in these spaces, also operating as a deliverer of healthcare, Stephanie uses social justice lens to identify ways in which the medicalization of the labor and birth process specifically, correlates to the current maternal health crisis which is singlehandedly harming black birthing bodies in superfluous figures. When Stephanie is not seeing clients, she is using her growing social media platforms to engage other birth-workers, and lovers of all-things-physiologic, through various methods of information dissemination.
ADDITIONAL SPEAKERS WILL BE ANNOUNCED ON A ROLLING BASIS.
MEET OUR 2018 lineup
meet our 2019 lineup