Faculty Presentation: Michelle Tea, Lipe Borges and Julia Cumes, and Paloma Barhaugh-Bordas
Wednesday, July 29, 2026
5-7 PM
Stanley Kunitz Common Room
Join us for a summer faculty reading and artist talk with writer Michelle Tea, photographers Lipe Borges and Julia Cumes, and artist Paloma Barhaugh-Bordas.
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
Michelle Tea is the author of many books, including the best selling Modern Tarot, the follow-up Modern Magic, and the recent novel, Little F. She is the recipient of honors from the Lambda Literary Association, the California Library Association, The Rona Jaffe Foundation and PEN/America. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, and the founding editor of DOPAMINE Books, among other literary interventions.
Lipe Borges is a Brazilian artist who uses the camera as a tool for connection and storytelling. Focused on portrait and documentary photography, he explores and celebrates the individuality in every person. His work has taken him into prisons, favelas, disaster zones, and vulnerable communities in South America. Rooted in the rhythm and resilience of Capoeira, his art blends movement, presence, and humanity. Based on Cape Cod since 2020, Borges received the 2023 Creative Futures Fellowship and the 2024 Teaching Artist Development Fellowship from The Cordial Eye, and was selected for the 2024 Creative Exchange Cohort by the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod.
Julia Cumes is a South African–born photographer rooted on Cape Cod whose work traces threads of identity, belonging, and women’s lives around the world. Drawing on her photojournalism background, she uses narrative imagery to explore public health, environmental resilience, and the intimate human stories that define communities from East Africa and South Asia to coastal New England. Her photographs have been published in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and exhibited nationally and internationally. Named the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod’s 2024 Artist of the Year, she believes in photography’s power to cultivate empathy and reveal overlooked lives.
Paloma Barhaugh-Bordas (they/them) is an artist, educator, and activist living and working in on the traditional lands of the Comanche – Austin, TX.
Barhaugh-Bordas’s art practice—which expands from print media into installation, as well as social and collaborative practices—works at the intersection of migration, queerness, and ecology. While thinking-through-making, Barhaugh-Bordas asks how art can contribute to ecological knowledge and build interspecies understanding, an inquiry they began investigating by comparing the stories of naturalization—becoming local—between Americans and non-native plants.
