Nasir Anthony Montalvo is an award-winning transdisciplinary journalist and memory worker.
2024 Culture & Narrative Fellows Our Fellows
Nasir Anthony Montalvo
(they/them/theirs)

About
Nasir Anthony Montalvo (b.1999) is an award-winning transdisciplinary journalist and memory worker based in Kansas City, MO. Montalvo uses archival praxis, digital media, popular education and the written word to move Black diasporic audiences towards life and a true dream beyond social platitudes. Montalvo currently holds a two-year writing residency at Charlotte Street; and is supported by local, national and international organizations including Stories For All, Diaspora Solidarities Lab, and the Solutions Journalism Network. Montalvo and their work has been been published in The Advocate, NPR, Teen Vogue, Cosmopolitan, HelloGiggles, and KC Studio. Montalvo is most recently founder of {B/qKC}: an archive of Black queer midwestern history is building power across Black queer generations, accessibly storytelling through digital media and artistic installations, and fighting fascist indoctrination in Missouri. Montalvo is queer, Afro-Boricua, and from Kissimmee, Florida.
Mediums: Memory Work, Archival Manipulation
Nasir on Their Project
{B/qKC} is a Black queer community archive, based in Kansas City, challenging out-dated archival practices through accessible storytelling, socioeconomic reparation, and intergenerational power building – all within the frame and study of midwestern Black queer history. To date, {B/qKC} has used traveling exhibitions, public art installations, parties and investigative journalism to promote its research and mission. Now, the hope for the next phase of the archive is to create more intimate, hands-on settings for folks to deeply engage with {B/qKC} and its art-archival practice for the first time. Through the help of TOA’s Culture and Narrative Fellowship, I am utilizing narrative research to establish a popular education extension of {B/qKC}. This extension would embody the core of {B/qKC}’s founding – tackling broad conversations about community-based archiving and working as empathic humans through memory; while having a hyper-local focus on Kansas City’s history of gentrification, and disrupting passive redlining through public art installation, temporary third space, and Black queer futurity. The extension will launch with “{B/qKC}: Volume_2.1”: a three-part workshop series that will carry conversations sparked from {B/qKC}’s second volume of archival research on Soakie’s, Kansas City’s former Black gay bar.
Along with this workshop series, I will be launching a searchable database for {B/qKC} at the end of this year so that audiences can easily access and peruse Black queer Kansas City artifacts. I understand the importance of preserving these materials and I am committed to protecting them from commercial corporations and archival institutions that seek to profit from the hard work and labor of marginalized communities. With this database, in combination with narrative intervention, I hope to create a space where the stories and experiences of Black queer people can be digitally-protected, celebrated, and cherished for years to come.