Michelle Tellez

Dr. Michelle Téllez, an interdisciplinary scholar trained in Community Studies, Sociology, Chicana/o Studies and Education, writes about identity, mothering, transnational community formation, cross-border labor organizing, gendered migration, autonomy and resistance along the U.S./Mexico border. Dr. Téllez has published in several book anthologies, and in journals such as Gender & Society, Feminist Formations, Aztlán, Chicana/Latina Studies, and Violence Against Women. She has also written for Truth Out, The Feminist Wire, Latino Rebels and Mujeres Talk. In her twenty years of community engagement and activism, she has been involved in multiple projects for change at the grassroots level utilizing critical pedagogy, principles of sustainability, community-based arts, performance, and visual media. Dr. Téllez is a founding member of the Chicana M(other)work Collective and the Binational Artist in Residency project. She is on the editorial review board for Chicana/Latina Studies: The Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social, on the executive board of directors for the Southwest Folklife Alliance and is the Faculty Fellow for the Guerrero Student Center.

A graduate of UCLA (B.A, 1996), Teachers College, Columbia University (M.A, 2000) and Claremont Graduate University (Ph.D., 2005), Dr. Téllez was a dissertation fellow in the department of Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (2004-2005) and a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Latina/o Studies Program at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (2007-2008). The recipient of various national fellowships, teaching and research awards, she most recently was awarded the Tucson Public Voices Fellowship for 2017-2018. Dr. Téllez taught at Arizona State University for eight years and Northern Arizona University for two; while at NAU she created and directed the Beyond Boundaries Initiative - a campus-community collaboration rooted in decolonial praxis, identity, and community formations across multiple borderlands.