About Me
My name is Dr. Tyana Velazquez-Smith, and I am a scholar, educator, and architect of liberatory learning spaces. As an autistic Black Latina, I move through the world both within and against it—to feel its sharp edges but also to map new contours, to attune myself to rhythms others do not hear, to find structure in the fluid, and to hold multiple truths at once. I was never meant to fit into rigid institutions, nor do I desire to. Instead, I build worlds where learning is pliable, where literacy is liberatory, and where play is not just a method but a philosophy of being.

My work is a love letter to Black and Brown neurodivergent children, to the ones whose brilliance has been misread, whose genius has been ignored, whose ways of knowing have been deemed unintelligible. I interrogate the ways in which education, language, and cognition are shaped by power—who gets to be understood, who gets to be heard, and whose knowledge is deemed legitimate.

In many ways, my work is about reversing the world—challenging what is considered normative, dismantling the architectures of exclusion, and rejecting the idea that our ways of thinking, playing, and learning must be standardized to be valued. It is about making Black neurodivergence legible in a world that often sees it as deviation, not genius.

And yet, for all the weight of this work, joy remains my compass. I find it in the laughter of children, in the radical potential of play, in the pages of books that make me feel seen, in the words of bell hooks, and in the small, sacred act of being fully, unapologetically myself. Because at the end of the day, if we are not learning toward joy, then what are we learning for?

In my free time, when I step away from the noise of the world, I find solace in the rhythm of my own movement—AirPods in, feet to pavement, thoughts stretching beyond the moment. I love the quiet focus of creating with my hands, shaping something tangible from the abstract, or the simple alchemy of baking—turning raw ingredients into something warm, something whole. I love our bodies—the way they hold us, the way they carry memory, the way they remind us that movement is not just survival but a form of communion. The more we honor them, the better we can be—individually and collectively.

Thank you for this space to share a piece of who I am.