Queer Resource Center Staff

About our Staff

We strive to embody the following...

1. "We are all teachers and we are all learners"
2. Generosity, Forgiveness, and Care towards Self and Others
3. Speaking with Care and Listening with Compassion
4. Using Social Justice as a Framework and Queerness as a Lens
5. Working in Intersectional, Intentional, and Flexible Ways
6. A Brave Space to Engage with Discomfort that Allows for Growth

About our Director

Adriana di Bartolo is the Director of the Queer Resource Center (QRC). The QRC serves the 5 undergrad colleges and 2 graduate universities of The Claremont Colleges. During her tenure at the center she has developed academic and social programming and events to build queer and allied community across the 7 college campuses. Adriana has also created and implemented an Ally Training program and has trained over 1000 students, faculty, and staff at the colleges. Adriana has also worked with the colleges’ Student Affairs Divisions to make the QRC into a fully funded 7-college center.

Adriana is a fourth year doctoral student in the School of Educational Studies at Claremont Graduate University. While working on her masters at Claremont Graduate University in Applied Women’s Studies with an emphasis in queer theory and femme subjectivity, Adriana was awarded the Maguire Teaching Assistantship. Adriana interned for California State Senator Shelia Kuhel, working on universal health care bill, SB 840, as well as educational policies for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth. During her time at Claremont Graduate University Adriana was named the Ahmanson Foundation Fellow for 2008-2009, in 2009 she was recognized for her excellence in higher education by the faculty of the School of Educational Studies. Adriana was also named the 2010 School Educational Studies Winifred Hausam-Helen Fisk Recipient. Her areas of interest and research include student affairs, monoritized student communities, community building between diverse student groups, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning students in post secondary education, identity development among college students, and feminist and queer theory. Adriana loves to chat about all things queer. Feel free to come in on her drop-in hours!

About our Program Coordinator

Ebony Williams is the Program Coordinator of the QRC. A transplant to Los Angeles from Brooklyn, New York, Ebony is a graduate from Wheaton College [Norton, MA] and a Posse Foundation Scholar. Ebony studied sociology and English Literature. As a queer woman of color and having been the President of the Alliance, Wheaton College’s LGBTA student group, Ebony was inspired to conduct her sociology capstone research on the experiences of queer students and alumnae/I of color in and outside of “community” at a small liberal arts college. Her final product was a comprehensive qualitative thesis titled, Exclusion in the Garden of Eden: The Experiences of Queer Students of Color Past and Present at Wheaton College. Upon graduating from Wheaton, Ebony became Program Coordinator at Wheaton’s Marshall Center for Intercultural Learning, where she specialized in Women and Gender Programming. The Marshall Center’s philosophy is rooted in Beverly Tatum’s A [Affirm Identity], B [Build Community], Cs [Cultivate Leaders] approach to creating climates of engagement within diverse communities. 

Trained in three models of facilitation training [Posse Foundation: Martini Glass Model, Everyday Democracy: Dialogue to Action Model, and Public Conversation Project: Difficult Dialogue Model] Ebony has facilitated many discussions such as on the topic of women’s experiences with hair, yoga philosophy and Black feminism, and women and politics. At the request of student groups, Ebony has also developed a dialogue model to bridge the gap between women and men of color on campus. In her capacity as advisor for student groups, Ebony developed collaborative models specific to the institution, student government, student group and the campus climate for student programming that is student driven and maximizes economic, human, and other resources in the most beneficial way possible. In addition, she has worked with student leaders to address academic and co-curricular struggles and has crafted and facilitated workshops to address conflict that arises within leadership teams. Able to train others to utilize facilitation skills, Ebony has developed and facilitated diversity trainings for over one- hundred Resident Assistants and Preceptors [Academic Peer Mentors] twice-yearly.

Ebony has also provided students with academic support by acting as administrative mentor for a first-year English 101 course, Children’s Literature in a Multicultural Society, where she taught a class on David Leviathan’s book Boy Meets Boy and worked with student peer advisors and faculty to support each student’s success. In addition, Ebony has co-facilitated a Dialogue to Action series as part of a Transnational Feminism course.
To cultivate leadership amongst Wheaton students and as the chair of the Weiss Women’s Leadership Fund, Ebony created opportunities for leadership development for students such as organizing student attendance to annual conferences within the New England area in addition to organizing students and student led groups to collaborate to create a gender conference called We Are Wheaton. 

In 2010, Ebony left her position at Wheaton College to pursue her Masters of Fine Arts at the California Institute of the Arts. Her work, whether it be How to Build A Ragdoll or her science fiction trilogy Grey Society, tends to explore the experiences of women in the Diaspora and the female body within and outside of family and home. In her time at CalArts, Ebony has taught first-year composition, creative writing at the Jeff Griffin LGBT Youth Center in West Hollywood, and taught interdisciplinary workshops that bring together the construction of ragdolls with writing, photography, and puppetry. Ebony’s Ragdoll work has been exhibited at CalArts, Avenue Studio 50 in Highland Park, and is forthcoming at the Riverside Art Museum.

In other work, Ebony chairs the LGBTA Alumnae/I Association Board at Wheaton College and site on the Alumnae/I Board of Directors. In her spare time, she crochets, is founding editor of her tiny press In-Process Inventory. IPI Press, enjoys taking long walks with her maltese named after Joni Mitchell, and fantasized about listening in on a conversation between Audre Lorde, Betty White, Hitler, C. Wright Mills, and John Edwards from Crossing Over.