Rachel Dorsey (she/her) is an autistic speech language pathologist who excels at teaching non-autistic therapists to better understand and support our neurodivergent clients. Rachel is on a mission to illuminate the many ways that seemingly “effective” strategies can actually wreak havoc on the lives of our autistic clients.

Rachel holds a Master of Science in Communication Sciences and Disorders from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has worked in school, clinic, and community-based settings with children and adolescents of all ages.

Sarah Selvaggi-Hernandez brought the language of “positive autistic self-identity” to Learn Play Thrive. We latched on and never looked back. Sarah is an autistic occupational therapist who studies, practices, and teaches person-affirming approaches to sensory-processing differences. Sarah is the creator of Ethics & Neurodiversity: Let’s Talk Sex and a guest instructor in The Learn Play Thrive Approach to Autism.

Sarah’s previous professional experience includes assistant professor of pediatrics and mental health at Bay Path University, early intervention therapist in Springfield, MA, and occupational therapist at psychiatric residential treatment facility in East Windsor, CT. She now works as a full-time autistic advocate and sensory consultant. Sarah and her husband Jeremy also served as a therapeutic foster family for the State of Connecticut for nearly twenty years, and continue to provide therapeutic respite care for autistic children. Sarah can be found happy-flapping with her family in Enfield, CT.

Kate McLaughlin (she/her) is a Speech-Language Pathologist specializing in augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) for individuals with complex communication needs. She believes that autonomous communication, inclusion, and self-determination are fundamental human rights. Kate teaches OTs and SLPs the practical strategies they need to support their clients’ autonomous and authentic connection using strengths-based strategies.

V Tisi (they/them) is an Autistic, Disabled, and Queer Taiwanese-Chinese-Venezuelan American clinician- and educator-activist. Their area of specialty is intersectional justice for multiply marginalized neurodivergent people. V teaches trauma-informed practices to support the social-emotional development and wellness of Autistic people. V is dedicated to pushing the needle forward on a more culturally responsive, equitable, and depathologized field of speech-language sciences. V has practiced speech language pathology in early intervention and schools, and is an adjunct faculty member at San Francisco State University teaching culturally responsive practices with an anti-racist and anti-ableist lens.

Lydia X. Z. Brown, Esq. is an abolitionist advocate, organizer, attorney, strategist, and writer whose work focuses on interpersonal and state violence against disabled people at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, faith, language, and nation. Their other interests include carcerality and institutional violence, asexuality as queerness, algorithmic harm as an accelerating force of systemic injustice, and the ableism-racism nexus of transracial and transnational adoption. Lydia is an adjunct lecturer in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program and the Disability Studies Program at Georgetown University, as well as Self-Advocacy Discipline Coordinator for the Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental Disabilities Fellowship program. They are also an adjunct professorial lecturer in American Studies in the Department of Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies at American University. Lydia is Policy Counsel for Privacy & Data at the Center for Democracy & Technology, focused on algorithmic discrimination and disability, as well as Director of Policy, Advocacy, & External Affairs at the Autistic Women & Nonbinary Network. They are the current co-president of the Disability Rights Bar Association, a commissioner on the American Bar Association’s Commission on Disability Rights, and Disability Justice Committee representative on the National Lawyers Guild board. Lydia founded the Fund for Community Reparations for Autistic People of Color’s Interdependence, Survival, and Empowerment, a project of collective care, redistributive justice, and mutual aid, and they are currently creating Disability Justice Wisdom Tarot. Often, their most important work has no title, job description, or funding, and probably never will.