ELLE MOXLEY
Elle founded the Marsha P. Johnson Institute to train and support Black trans women and gender-nonconforming people, and before that, she was already in the fight: co-founding Black Lives Matter's organizing infrastructure and leading the Year Without Tamir campaign in Cuyahoga County, demanding accountability after Tamir Rice's murder at the hands of the Cleveland police. That's the same ground, the same grief, the same city where Aubin's Dispatches from Cleveland came to be an organizing tool.
She didn’t only inspire that film, she shaped it, she appeared in it. Her work with Tamir’s mother Samaria a clear thread through Aubin’s portrait of a city in crisis and the intersectional organizing happening there. It’s proof of what queer and trans leaders have always known and too rarely been credited for, that movement building only works when it’s holistic, when grief, policy, and joy are organized together rather than apart.
Deployed as a catalyst by the Ohio Organizing Collaborative and Cleveland Votes, Dispatches from Cleveland helped drive first-time youth voter turnout from 23% to 53%. That’s real, measurable impact.
She's never separated the policy fight from the joy, insisting that Black trans people deserve both safety and celebration. Her refusal to choose between the urgent and the human, her inner confidence that the way forward includes both, is also what Aubin is dedicated to carrying in our work.