Victor Ultra Omni
PhD Candidate
Emory University

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Victor Ultra Omni, M.A. (They/Them) is a PhD Candidate in the department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. Their dissertation The Love Ball: A History of New York City's House-Structured Ballroom Culture 1972-1992 provides a historical treatment of the origins of ballroom culture. They use methods of oral history, participatory action research, and broader memory work to engage the pioneers of New York City's house-structured ballroom culture. In 2025, Victor Ultra Omni is the New York University's Hemispheric Institute's 2025 Scholar in Residence and the inaugural Trans Studies at the Commons Fellow at the University of Kansas..


Victor's research has won research support from the Mellon Foundation, Society for Visual Anthropology, Social Science Research Council, Institute for Citizens and Scholars, Imagining America, and the Ten:Tacles Initiative for Transgender History. Currently they are the co-editing Trans Studies Quarterly issue 12.4 with Dr. Eva Pensis and ballroom-archivist-filmmaker Noelle Deleon.


As a teacher and student at Emory University they have received awards and fellowships from the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, the Candler School of Theology, Center for Faculty Excellence, Center for Race & Ethnicity, Studies in Sexuality, the Piedmont Sustainability Prooject, the  Initiative for Global Studies, and are presently Laney Graduate School's Teaching Assistant Training Opportunity Fellow. In 2022, they co-founded Emory University's Black Feminist Working Group. Their writing is published in Trans Studies Quarterly (TSQ), the African American Intellectual Historical Society, The Black Scholar, and the textbook Feminist Studies: Foundations, Conversations, and Applications among other publications. One of their recent pieces written with ther mentor Dr. Laura Alexandra Harris can be read in the 10th anniversary issue of Trans Studies Quarterly 10 (3-4), "Who Is They?: Black Queer/Trans Vernacular Grammars."

Victor is a trans masculine Afro-Latine memory worker, teacher, and writer. Since 2017, they have been a proud father in the iconic worldwide pioneering House of Ultra Omni. Beyond their academic work, Victor is member of the Black Memory Workers Collective, Southern Memory Workers, and Invisible Histories Project. They are currently a community advisor to the Museum of the City of New York's exhibition ¡Urban Stomp! which opens in the spring of 2025. Victor is invested in building partnerships that preserve the legacies of Black and brown queer and/or trans people. 

With a strong commitment to popular education and the transformative potential of research, they welcome opportunities for speaking engagements, consulting, curatorial work,  policy reports, and post-doctoral positions. Their expertise in the history of ballroom culture, oral history, and Black trans studies makes them a sought-after speaker and consultant. Victor has delivered lectures and workshops at non-profits and institutions. You can see a selection of their public scholarship under "interviews and media".They are eager to contribute to new projects and collaborations that align with their research interests and advocacy work.