Jessica Valadez Vázquez is an Angelena, UCLA undergraduate alumni, and Mellon Mays Undergraduate Research Fellow since 2012. She is an artist-scholar whose interdisciplinary praxis (theory+practice) examines Chicana/o/x Studies, Black Studies, and Performance Studies with an emphasis on dance historiography and mixed heritage material feminisms. In other words, she is an embodied critical race theorist and historiographer who happens to be an artist and mother too. Currently, she is a fourth-year at UCSB in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies with a master's in the same. She continues her graduate studies as a promising Ph.D. student and longtime master spoken word artist who performs protest poetry that demands social justice for invisibilized groups in U.S. contexts particularly, urban cities like Los Angeles from whence she hails. In 2019, she was awarded The Carol Press and Nicholas B. Tingle Award of Excellence in Graduate Studies for an interdisciplinary project examining the Latinidad of twentieth-century Black Intellectual, multifaceted innovator, and creator of dance anthropology--teacher by day and international starlet by night: Katherine “La Katarina” Dunham (b.1909-d. 2006). Valadez also worked the role of archivist and curator in the Carlos Morton Archives, for an infamous Chicano playwright, emeritus University of California, Santa Barbara Theater professor, and fellow Chicano mentor, Dr. Carlos Morton made possible through funding from the endowment for the Global Latinidades project administered by director Dr. Ben Olguin, University of California, Santa Barbara, Chair in the department of English.