Meet Our Speakers
Joel Simpson (he/him)
Joel is the Founder and Managing Director of SASOD Guyana. He holds a Bachelor of Laws Degree from the University of Guyana. He is a Chevening scholar with a Master of Laws Degree in Human Rights Law from the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom. He has over 18 years’ experience working in gender, human rights and HIV, including roles such as the UNESCO Human Rights Researcher at the HIV Education Unit at the University of the West Indies (UWI) St. Augustine campus in Trinidad and Human Rights Associate at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Guyana. Simpson sits on the Board of Directors of the Guyana Responsible Parenthood Association (GRPA) and the steering committee of the regional Caribbean Forum for the Liberation and Acceptance of Genders and Sexualities (CariFLAGS).
Ephraim Adamz (he/they), Moderator
DJ, filmmaker, songwriter, entertainer, and activist Ephraim Adamz made his debut on YouTube in 2014 with the viral music video “Twerk Bitch (You A Bottom)”. Since then he has collaborated with over fifteen Pride Festivals. Two are the largest in the United States, Rhode Island Pride and Stonewall 50 WorldPride in NYC 2019. During the Covid-19 pandemic he was one of twenty-four video editors to produce Global Pride 2020, the worlds largest LGBTQ+ virtual event in history.
In 2021 he directed the documentary T-Girl: The Truth In Transitioning which follows a trans woman’s journey through gender reassignment surgery. A second documentary titled Pride Before Covid (New England Virtual Pride) evaluates how the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted queer communities.
The same year he began working on his EP “Uprising 1969”, a retrospective on The Stonewall riots and the modern police brutality protests in response to the murder of George Floyd. The single “Street Lamps (I Can’t Breathe)” uses documentary footage from his attendance at the 2020 March on Washington hosted by Al Sharpton and Martin Luther King Jr. the 3rd. A second single “Pride Month” went viral on TikTok.