2025 Participant Biographies

Heart (he/ él) is a Social Worker in Training at Columbia University in New York, set to graduate in May 2025. He is a research assistant on trans masc access to gender affirming care and sexual health services such as PrEP. Heart is an organizer and co-founded monthly Trans Men and Trans Masc social meet ups in Asheville, North Carolina in 2022 which continue to meet today. He is currently a Ridgewood, NY resident. He finds himself in the art galleries of Chelsea and the Blue Ridge mountains of Appalachia. Prior to graduate school, Heart created a community and brand, Trans Yoga Teacher. He enjoys teaching yoga as a liberatory practice. Showing up for his practice is much like his queerness, a refusal to comply with society’s expectations of us and a choice to choose one’s self and self-love as an everyday gift. Heart studied yoga under the tutelage of Aqeel Yaseen in DC and Sri Dharma Mittra, primarily, although he is indebted to many teachers' care and generosity. He received his 200-Hour Yoga Teacher Training Certificate in 2017 from Dharma Yoga in New York and completed a 500-Hour Training in 2019. Yoga gave him tools to cope with getting sober and and supported him through his coming out process and trans and queer. He is also in recovery from disordered eating and teaches from a space that is anti-diet and weight neutral. Heart originally hails from the DMV but considers himself a student of the world. He is multilingual and loves learning about other ways of living. He's spent time living in Madagascar and the Dominican Republic and hopes to return to living abroad again, perhaps in Berlin, where his family's Pennsylvania Dutch roots lie. Talk to him about travel and where you've spent time outside the US and his ear's all yours. Fun fact; he started elementary school in Dauphin, just outside of Harrisburg and hasn't been back since he started transition, so it will be great to be back!