NTanya is currently the Community Education Coordinator for Ozone House Youth & Family Services, a local agency that has been serving runaway, homeless and at-risk youth and their families since 1969. She coordinates outreach programs, public relations and fundraising for the agency, and participates in a number of coalitions around youth and community health issues. NTanya is also a Ph.D. student in American Studies & African American Studies at Yale University, where she is studying the history of Black politics in the US, the history of race & sexuality in urban American, and oral history methods.
She is also active in the local chapter of Alliance for the Mentally Ill, an organization that advocates for the mentally ill and provides support to family members of people with mental illness.
She came to Ann Arbor form Brooklyn, New York, where she was active in local public school reform activism, lesbian & gay politics, and AIDS organizing in the Black community. She was a leader in a citywide, multiracial coalition organized to fight right wing attacks on multiculturalism in the public schools, and worked to help elect several progressives to local school boards. She has published a number of articles about her education organizing.
NTanya graduated from Brown University in May, 1991, where she was a peer counselor, a student leader in campus anti-racist and Black student organizing, an active participant in student-of-color coalitions, and the founder of the University's first organization for lesbian, gay and bisexual students of color. Her awards include a Harry Truman Public Service Scholarship, the Joslin Public Service Award, being chosen to represent student leaders in a campus panel with South Africa's Bishop Desmond Tutu, and admission into Phi Beta Kappa.