About

Victor Ultra Omni is a scholar and oral historian of Black queer and trans cultural history, with a particular focus on New York City’s house-structured ballroom culture. Their writing appears in Transgender Studies Quarterly (TSQ), The Black Scholar, Black Perspectives, and the Routledge textbook Feminist Studies: An Introductory Reader, as well as public outlets including Truthout, URGE, and Lux. Victor is the lead editor of TSQ 13.3, “Legends, Statements, and Stars,” the first academic journal issue devoted to house and ball culture out August 2026.

Victor’s book manuscript in progress, The Love Ball: A History of House-Structured Ballroom Culture, New York City, 1972–1992, is the first sustained historical study of ballroom’s origins. The project draws on thirty-five oral histories conducted over eight years, extensive original archival materials, and Victor’s experience as a ballroom participant who has walked, won, and organized balls. A father in the House of Ultra Omni since 2017, Victor reconstructs how Black and Latine trans and queer youth transformed conditions of urban austerity, racialized policing, and the AIDS epidemic into new structures of kinship known as houses. Victor also created an open-source archive of oral histories and archival materials at the Hemispheric Institute  of Performance & Politics New York University.

Victor’s research has received support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, and the Hemispheric Institute, where they were a Mellon Scholar-in-Residence in 2025. Current advisory appointments include the Trans Media Portal and Black Trans Futures Collective. A former Imagining America Fellow, Victor held the role of co-director of Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE) and Executive Advisory Board member for Imagining America during the 2025-2026 academic year. Previously, they were on the Advisory Board for Trans Studies at the Commons and Museum of the City of New York’s exhibition ¡Urban Stomp! Dreams and Defiance on the Dance Floor.

They are currently collaborating with director Mickaela Bradford on Fourteenth of Frances, a 2027 project that will bring Bradford’s poetic film Under False Colors (2024), about the life of Frances Thompson, back to Memphis, Tennessee. The project received support from the Transgender Educational Network: Theory in Action for Creativity, Liberation, Empowerment, and Service (TENTACLES).