Faculty Presentation: Celeste Lecesne, Lena Woolf, Cecilia Ruiz
Wednesday, July 1, 2026
5-7 PM
Stanley Kunitz Common Room
Join us for a summer reading and artist talk with writer Celeste Lecesne and artists Lena Wolff and Cecilia Ruiz.
To join us virtually, visit our YouTube Channel and look for the “Upcoming live streams” section. The majority of our public events are available via YouTube live stream with the presenters’ permission.
About Our Speakers
Celeste Lecesne (he/they) wrote the short film Trevor, which won an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short, and inspired the founding of The Trevor Project, the largest 24/7 lifeline for LGBTQ+ youth. For over 30 years, Lecesne has been telling stories as a playwright, actor, screenwriter, author and producer. The New York Times ranked him “among the most talented solo performers of his (or any) generation.” Lecesne is co-founder & Artistic Director of The Future Perfect Project, a national arts initiative dedicated to amplifying the creative voices of LGBTQ+ youth, and he is a recipient of a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Lena Wolff is an artist, craftswoman, independent teacher, and activist for democracy who has been based in the San Francisco Bay Area since the early 1990’s. Her work extends out of American folk-art and quilt making traditions while at the same time being connected to minimalism, geometric abstraction, Op art, social practice, feminist and political art. Wolff’s broad interconnected artistic output includes drawing, collage, sculpture, frequent collaboration, and public projects. Her work is in the permanent collections of ONE National Lesbian and Gay Archives, the Berkeley Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Oakland Museum of California, among others. She lives with her wife, artist Miriam Klein Stahl, in Berkeley, California.
Cecilia Ruiz is an author, illustrator, and educator. Her illustration graphic style, rooted in traditional printmaking, lends itself to simple, happy expressions. However, her most compelling works are the ones in which melancholy hides within the bold colors and shapes. Ruiz was born and raised in Mexico City and now lives in New York City, where she teaches at the School of Visual Arts and Queens College.
