DE ALMA is a celebrated trans pioneer, interdisciplinary artist, DJ, musician, and community organizer whose work moves through nightlife, ritual, performance, mutual aid, and collective liberation. Born in Michoacán, Mexico and shaped by migration to California, her practice is guided by the matrilineal courage, resilience, and radical care of her Latina and Afro-Caribbean foremothers. Like the Monarch Butterfly, her journey reflects transformation, movement, and survival across borders, bodies, bloodlines, and land.
For more than a decade, De Alma has helped shape the Bay Area’s queer and trans cultural landscape through performance, music, organizing, and artist advocacy. Beginning in San Francisco’s Mission District, she found her first stage at Aunt Charlie’s Lounge as FIERA, a femme-rage drag persona rooted in visibility, experimentation, and the centering of women of color in performance.
In 2016, she co-founded HOE is LIFE, a sex-positive QTBIPOC2S+ drag showcase, and later became a core organizer with New World Dysorder, the Bay Area’s first trans DJ collective centering trans and gender-nonconforming artists. Through NWD, De Alma grew from performer to organizer, manager, and community “mother,” helping sustain a decade-long legacy of trans-led underground electronic music, mutual aid, and cultural survival. The NWD 10-Year Anniversary in 2025 marked a capstone moment in this legacy: a celebration of trans, nonbinary, and femme-centered nightlife, intergenerational belonging, and the pioneering role NWD has played in the underground dance scene.
De Alma’s artistic work often blends sound, ritual, memory, and migration. In Ātl, her 2024 ARC Seed interdisciplinary performance, she invokes the Nahuatl word for water as a symbol of the river flowing through her evolution—connecting past, present, and future. The piece reflects her journey as a migrant trans mujer through a lush sonic and visual landscape, evoking spiritual rain, ancestral nourishment, and transformation.
Her 2023 project AFTERLIFE: A Journey Through Mictlan expanded this ritual practice into an immersive Dia de Muertos-inspired experience of self-discovery, ancestral connection, and collective release. As organizer, artist, designer, curator, and promoter, De Alma created a space where participants could dance with the seen and unseen, honor their ancestors, and plant seeds for future generations.
Her performance work also includes Queer Rebels Fest 2022, a three-part video performance exploring grief, transformation, and rebirth across San Francisco, the Oakland Hills, and Richmond Point Annex. Through live performance footage, landscape, and embodied ritual, the piece locates personal healing within a broader geography of queer and trans survival.
As a DJ and musician, De Alma has gained national and international recognition, performing at Boiler Room, Art Basel, 1015 Folsom, Bossa Nova Civic Club, and venues throughout the Bay Area, Detroit, Mexico City, Chicago, and New York. She has shared stages with artists including Yves Tumor, Green Velvet, Jasmine Infiniti, Ms Nina, La Goony Chonga, Peaches, and Nina Sky. Her track “Storm” with Jasmine Infiniti, begun during shelter-in-place and evolving through multiple iterations, reflects the same commitment to sonic experimentation, survival, and emotional release.
Across her practice, De Alma has produced and performed at hundreds of fundraisers, panels, drag shows, mutual-aid events, and cultural gatherings, including Club A.B.L.U.N.T., AFTERLIFE Dia de Muertos, Taking Root with CALPEP and East Bay Getting to Zero, and community-centered Pride events. Her visual archive includes performance images from SomArts Dia de los Muertos Drag Show, The Stud/Dazed Magazine, Club A.B.L.U.N.T. flyers, posters, and design work that document her role as both cultural producer and image-maker.
Whether behind the decks, in performance, designing immersive worlds, organizing fundraisers, or mentoring emerging artists, De Alma’s work is rooted in one clear declaration: queer and trans people of color have always been here, shaping culture from the ground up. Her practice transforms nightlife into ritual, performance into testimony, and community gathering into a lifeline of survival, healing, and collective resistance.
