I’m Stxph Viana, a communications strategist, organizer, multidisciplinary artist, and movement builder. My work lives wherever story, strategy, culture, community, and action meet.
Before my work took me across the country, I was organizing on the ground in Florida. I founded Ripple Hauxs as a space built around what I knew our communities needed: connection, safety, access, information, and each other. Through that work, we reached more than 250 BIPOC trans people and created opportunities for our community to access things like firearm safety and TECC training without cost becoming another barrier.
Ripple Hauxs taught me how to build with people, not just for them. It taught me how to listen closely, move with urgency, stretch limited resources, and create something real when the infrastructure we needed simply did not exist.
That chapter also taught me what leadership asks of you when things get difficult.
After experiencing a public smear campaign, I had a choice about what I would carry forward from it. I chose to turn it into something useful. What began as a deeply personal experience became the foundation for a workshop and a larger mission around conflict, accountability, communication, and what it actually takes for trans and BIPOC trans communities to move through our differences without destroying one another in the process.
I became increasingly interested in a question I still carry with me:
How do we build movements strong enough to hold disagreement?
Our communities are navigating enormous external pressures, but we also have to be willing to examine how we communicate with one another, how we handle harm, how we approach conflict, and how we stay in relationship when our experiences or perspectives do not perfectly align. I want to help develop language, tools, and practices that make those conversations possible. Not to erase accountability or difference, but to give us more ways to move through them and keep building.
Today, I serve as Managing Director of Communications and Programs at the Marsha P. Johnson Institute, where my work has expanded from local organizing into national communications, programming, storytelling, partnerships, events, strategy, and movement leadership. I now have the opportunity to travel the country, sit in rooms with organizers and leaders doing this work in radically different ways, learn new skills, share what I know, and bring those lessons back into the work.
I take that access seriously.
I am still a student of this movement. I expect I always will be. Every city, community, organizer, artist, elder, young leader, mistake, breakthrough, and hard conversation has something to teach me.
What I know how to do is build. I know how to take an idea and give it language. I know how to turn lived experience into strategy. I know how to create stories, campaigns, programs, spaces, and conversations that help people see what is possible. And I know that visibility means very little to me if I am not using it to move resources, opportunity, understanding, and power closer to our communities.
The work I started in Florida did not disappear when Ripple Hauxs paused. It evolved with me.
Now I am taking everything I have learned from organizing in the trenches, building community from the ground up, navigating conflict, creating art, leading communications, and working on a national stage, and asking what I can build with it next.
I am invested in the collective future of our movement.
And I intend to help shape it.
