Gavilán Rayna Russom is a visionary artist, composer, scholar, and curator based in New York City. Over the past two decades she has produced a complex body of works oriented towards providing alternatives to binary thought and fixed modes of categorization. In addition to an extensive discography of recorded music, she has presented solo and collaborative works in performance, video, and installation at a range of international institutions.

Since her teens, Rayna has been involved with clubs, artist-run venues, and other “underground” spaces of artistic exchange and community. She has presented her own work and curated events in and for these spaces for more than thirty years and has consistently advocated for their cultural value in her writing and public speaking.

Rayna is the founding director of Voluminous Arts, a cultural organization whose mission is to foreground, nurture, and advance the experimental artistic culture of transgender people and communities. Through Voluminous Arts she co-curated and co-directed the summer 2023 residency program Bloom How You Must, Wild Until We Are Free at the Center for Art, Research, and Alliances, as well as the accompanying Cooler Nights experimental performance series and Traces: Sonic and Material closing exhibition.