2026 Treat a Stranger Grant Recipient

Gavilán Rayna Russom is a composer, artist, curator, and folklorist based in NYC. Over her 30-year career, she has created dynamic and reverberant works in sound, installation, video, text, and performance that challenge fixed ideas about musical and social forms. Rayna's work uses the harmonic and timbral properties of synthesis and extended use of the studio environment, often in connection with visual abstraction and experimental approaches to writing. Through these, she models a sense of expansive and transformative possibility. Her works have been presented internationally through live performances, exhibitions, publications, and an extensive discography. Rayna was the artist-in-residence at Esponja, São Paulo, in 2024. She has been a mentor through The Hildegard Competition, Luna Composition Lab, and the A.I.R. Fellowship. Rayna is the founder of Voluminous Arts, an organization dedicated to the experimental artistic culture of transgender people and communities. She holds an MA in Cultural Sustainability.

Photo by Olympia Lolo

This year, at 51 years old, I’m finally able to have a gender affirming surgery that I’ve needed for a long time. As a trans woman with a lifelong commitment to creating and fostering experimental works, I’ve experienced a lot of precarity. The kind of stability needed to undergo this surgery has taken a long time to build. In addition, I’m still dealing with long-term effects of contracting Covid in early 2020, during a time when my immune system was already compromised. These factors, as well as the experience of living with both complex trauma and PTSD, have made the long period I need to take off from work to recover from surgery a big lift. Community support has been a critical and wonderful part of how I’m able to do that. 

If you would like to offer support during this time you can contribute to my GoFundMe here.