Our Team
Colby Xzavier King
Co-Founder & Executive Director
Born in Houston and raised in Dallas, Texas, Colby X. King is an youth leader, educator, and advocate whose work sits at the intersection of culture, justice, and community. A graduate of Columbia University with a B.A. in African American and African Diaspora Studies and Psychology, King served as Chair of the University Senate’s Diversity Commission and was recognized with the Ralph Bunche Award for Leadership and Service as well as the Charles Bjorkwall Prize.
Rooted in a lifelong commitment to service that began in the Black church, King has spent nearly a decade designing and leading programs that expand opportunity for young people including workforce development and career readiness initiatives in Dallas, Flint, and New York City as well as mentorship and teaching roles with MITES at MIT, Peer Health Exchange, and The Brotherhood/Sister Sol. He has also delivered keynote addresses for the NYC Department of Education.
Professionally, King works at the nexus of marketing and social impact. He currently serves as a Marketing Operations Analyst at Justworks and previously held marketing and strategy roles at American Express, where he also served on the PRIDE+ community engagement committee and the Black Engagement Network’s professional development and community impact committees. His earlier work includes roles with the ACLU, Vera Institute of Justice, and Columbia’s Center for Justice, and he is a current Defending Democracy Fellow with Western States Center.
In 2025, Colby won the David Prize honoring his long term commitment to service and idea to launch KAC. He has been featured in The Gothamist and The Advocate for his work.
Since joining the Kiki ballroom scene in 2022, where he walks in the male figure face category, King has drawn on his “corporate by day, ballroom by night” perspective to shape the vision of the Kiki Arts Collaborative — building pathways for emerging artists, preserving cultural memory, and advancing the social, political, and artistic futures of the ballroom community.
Asmara Pierre-Louis
Co-Founder & Curatorial Director
Asmara is a community-based artist and organizer from the Northeast Bronx with experience in healing-focused arts education, artist support, and curation. During her undergraduate studies at Harvard University, she focused on the role of art as a catalyst and archive of social revolutions across the Black Diaspora. Inspired by the unique and powerful ability of art to affect social change through deepening empathy and inspiring consciousness shifts, she transitioned to work as an Independent Curator at the Brooklyn Museum, BronxArtSpace, and Rios Intermitentes, an international arts festival in Matanzas, Cuba. Through these exhibitions, she specifically addressed barriers between local communities and artists of marginalized identities, and the institutional art world with community-oriented programming that successfully brought new populations into these spaces. As a curator, she champions a Black feminist and expansive approach to traditional definitions of “artisty” and “artists,” taking an interest in projects that may not be rooted in classical training but hold great meaning in our socio-economic landscape.
Asmara developed her curatorial career alongside the establishment and growth of Ujamaa Garden, a community garden in the Northeast Bronx, co-stewarded by Asmara that uses agroecological methods and coalition-building to make food sovereignty a reality for people impacted by food apartheid. For Asmara, the arts world and grassroots community spaces are necessary channels that must be activated independently and together to build a more caring and just society. At KAC, she is excited to lend experience in artist development, relationship-building between artists and institutions, and community organizing to help the incredibly talented artists and cultural practitioners emerging from the KiKi Ballroom Scene cultivate sustainable and agential careers.
A current More Arts Fellow and Dancing Futures Artist in Residence, as well as a youth educator in environmental studies throughout the Bronx, Asmara brings to KAC an incisive understanding of the needs of underrepresented artists in navigating institutional systems as well as deep knowledge on how to build effective curriculums and programming that empower BIPOC young people to see themselves as vital leaders in their communities.