Thursday, October 23 – Sunday, October 26, 2025
Lesbian Lives Conference
CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York City

Friday, October 24, Friday at 8:30 AM
Panel: Polish Perspectives: History, Publishing, and Lesbian Collectives
C-Level Concourse Room 201
CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York City
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The Polish Cultural Institute New York is pleased to announce the participation of Ada Adu Rączka and Rita Müller in the upcoming Lesbian Lives Conference 2025, one of the most significant international forums dedicated to lesbian studies, creativity, and activism. The conference will be held at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City from October 23–26, 2025.

Ada Adu Rączka and Rita Müller will contribute to the panel “Polish Perspectives: History, Publishing, and Lesbian Collectives”, scheduled for Friday, October 24, 8:30 AM, in the C-Level Concourse Room 201 at the CUNY Graduate Center. Their joint presentation, Staging Unpresentable, explores artistic and academic approaches to mapping lesbian traces in Polish history. The panel will address how fragmented archives and memory can be reconstructed through artistic practice, theory, and creative methodologies.

Rita Müller & Ada Adu Rączka Program Focus:
Staging unpresentable. Artistic and academic approaches to map lesbian traces in Polish history

What strategies do we have while facing incomplete lesbian archives? By taking the form of visual presentations, we will share thoughts on how theory and academic methodology can overlap with artistic and poetic tools of accessing history. We want to join our different approaches and skills to stage what usually seems ephemeral and “unpresentable”.

Ada Adu Rączka is currently working on the text and drawing project that circulates the figure of Maria Grabowska – a writer, a non-heteronormative woman, a researcher of literature of the Romanticism period, and a friend of Ada’s great-grandmother. She/he will focus on presenting dilemmas that she/he met while investigating both material and non-material traces left by Grabowska. How does Maria function in Ada’s family system of reproducing memories? How to creatively re-construct Maria’s visions by facing notes, poems, and objects she left without romanticizing her life? How to take responsibility for her heritage?

Rita Müller as a part of her PhD project is now focusing on the history of OLA-Archivum (National Feminist Lesbian Archive) – a social initiative (included publishing a “Furia Pierwsza” magazine, collecting archives, lesbian studies courses, women’s meetings, film screenings) started by Olga Stefaniuk in 1996 and operated in Warsaw until 2001. It is unknown where the archives and the archivist are today. Rita traces scattered references to the lesbian community gathered around OLA-Archivum. She aims to present remains of past activities and reflects on what is missing. By showing some “evidence” and many “white spots” Rita will reflect on strategies for reconstructing recent Polish queer herstory.

In the form of dialogue, Rita and Ada will present their work-in-progress projects and look for mutual strategies that can be drawn from their experiences. They will look for crossing points in their approaches and celebrate differences by compiling fragmentary visual representations of forgotten life stories.

About Lesbian Lives 2025

The Lesbian Lives Conference, hosted by the Journal of Lesbian Studies, Sinister Wisdom, and CLAGS: the Center for LGBTQ Studies at CUNY, has run since 1993 and is recognized as the longest-running academic conference on lesbian studies. It brings together leading and emerging voices from academia, art, and activism. Past participants have included notable speakers, Emma Donoghue, Jackie Kay, Val McDermid, Joan Nestle, Sarah Schulman, Cherry Smyth, Del La Grace Volcano, Sarah Waters, Campbell X and academics such as Sara Ahmed, Terry Castle, Laura Doan, Lisa Downing, Lillian Faderman, Sarah Franklin, Claire Hemmings, Alison Hennegan, Sally R. Munt, Susan Stryker, Helena Whitbread, Bonnie Zimmerman among many others. The conference prioritizes accessibility, diversity, dialogue, and inclusive participation, making it a vital platform for international exchange. Programs include plenary sessions, performances, film screenings, and workshops across multiple venues of the CUNY Graduate Center, offering a comprehensive exploration of contemporary and historical issues in lesbian studies.

The broader program of Lesbian Lives 2025 includes panels on:

· Lesbian publishing practices in Poland

· Cross-cultural lesbian poetry

· Queer and lesbian zine cultures

· Intergenerational dialogues in lesbian activism

· Workshops on archives, community building, and queer health

Ada Adu Rączka is a non-binary visual artist and poet. A graduate of Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main in the class of Judith Hopf, they combine poetry, drawing, and moving image in a practice attentive to language, memory, and care. Rączka is the author of the poetry collections Nie róbmy nic, błagam. Ale powiedzmy innym, że robiłyśmy (2019), Chciałośmy (2022), and Byłobyśbyło (2024), as well as the art-zine Próba wejścia z brzucha | Próba wejścia do brzucha (2021, with Zofka Kofta and Girls and Queers to the Front). Their work has been presented at exhibitions in Warsaw, Bytom, Sopot, Stockholm, and Berlin, including Chcemy całego życia. Feminizmy w sztuce polskiej at the State Gallery of Art in Sopot (2024). They were a Visegrad Literary Residency Fellow (Prague, 2023) and hold a scholarship from Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes. Rączka is a member of Plenum of Care, a collective of artists and thinkers engaging with care as artistic practice.

Rita Müller is a writer, artist, and researcher whose work spans socially engaged projects, publications, and academic inquiry into queer history in Poland. She is a PhD candidate at the Doctoral School of Humanities, University of Warsaw, researching non-heteronormative histories of the 1990s and 2000s. A graduate of Cultural Studies at the University of Warsaw, her award-winning MA thesis analyzed performance practices at the queer Le Madame Club in Warsaw.

Müller has published widely, including in “View: Theories and Practices of Visual Culture”, “InterAlia: a journal of queer studies”, “Dialog: a journal of contemporary drama”, and “Dwutygodnik”. She collaborates with the Queer Museum initiative of Lambda Warszawa and the Queer Studies Student Collective (4EU+ Alliance), while also lecturing on cultural anthropology and curating contemporary art projects. Her research and practice focus on the politics of archives, memory, and queer collectivity.

History of the Conference

The Lesbian Lives Conference is a large international event focusing on lesbian studies, creativity, and activism that draws speakers and participants from all continents and hosts the best-known as well as emerging scholars in the field. Running since 1993, the guiding values of the conference are: accessibility, diversity, dialogue, and inclusive welcome. This ethos has meant that our conference has been attended and organized by people of all genders and none, with differing embodiments, a variety of sexual (and asexual) orientations and different political affiliations.

The social, cultural, and artistic impact of this conference cannot be underestimated as it gathers academics, activists, performers, and writers who do not otherwise could address such large audiences or to network across international and professional boundaries. It is a forum for political organization on the levels of both community activism and established international NGOs. Many books (academic and literary) and films (documentaries and dramas) are launched at this event, and it is continually referenced in lesbian work and events internationally.

The conference sets the parameters for debate in the manifold disciplines that now take “Lesbian” or “Lesbian Communities” as the object of enquiry or as a category for analysis. The Lesbian Lives conference is open to people of all identities and strongly welcomes and encourages members of all LGBTQ communities to attend. The conference is a mix of academics, activists, and artists and none of the above. The focus is on “lesbian” which remains that vexed, curious term (both adjective and noun) that not all are fully comfortable in embracing, but yet the banner “lesbian” works to attract a range of people to explore, converse and create and the atmosphere of the Lesbian Lives Conference is something distinct and special — there is a friendliness, a warmth, an excitement, an openness, a bravery, and generosity that every Lesbian Lives Conference has generated.

The Lesbian Lives Conference is an inclusive space, open to all genders and sexual orientations. There is an ethos of welcome and accessibility. The Lesbian Lives Conference is committed to LGBTQ+ rights and gender inclusive research practice and has signed a comprehensive statement of support for ‘Feminists Fighting Transphobia’ accessible here.

The above information is sourced from the official website of the event organizer.

Participation of Ada Adu Rączka and Rita Müller in Lesbian Lives is supported by the Polish Cultural Institute New York.