Bali White worked at HMI from 2010-2013 as an HIV Prevention Coordinator under Health & Wellness. While at HMI, she also developed and implemented initiatives for young trans women and men who have sex with men in the ballroom community. Prior to joining HMI, Bali focused on addressing the unique health needs of hard-to-reach sexual and gender minority (SGM) populations.
Similar to her work at HMI, Bali designed and managed NYC and CDC funded health programming at Housing Works, GMHC, and Harlem United serving SGM youth and adults. At Lutheran Medical Center, Bali coordinated HIV/STD and hepatitis prevention strategies targeting populations often thought inaccessible—undocumented immigrants, the homeless, youth, LGBTQIA—throughout Brooklyn neighborhoods.
Bali went onto serve as an Associate at the National Center for Transgender Equality organizing trainings, workshops and meetings on improving workplace policies, health and legal coverage, and other diversity and inclusion topics related to cultural sensitivity for federal agencies such as the Department of Justice, White House, Department of Education, Congressional Staffers, as well as corporations and universities, and facilitated communications with SGM communities and allies nationally.
Bali is currently working at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion as a Principal Strategist within the Portfolio for Sexual and Gender Minorities group. She first joined the NIH in 2014 as a NIH Academy Intramural Research Training Awardee. Assigned to the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences and the mentorship of Dr. William Elwood, as a Fellow she presented research posters across NIH, on Capitol Hill and at the International AIDS Conference in South Africa, regarding intersectional impacts on the health of African American women of transgender experience in NYC. She also co-authored an American Psychological Association textbook chapter on counseling transgender people of color.
Bali is known in the community for advocating and addressing transgender identity, legal, healthcare and social concerns at the national, state and local levels. Her research and activist work around transgender advocacy and ballroom community youth has been influential in the field of public health.
She is a magna cum laude graduate of Columbia University, where she also completed her masters work. Bali has an academic background in cultural studies and languages, and she has served on the National Advisory Board for the Center of Excellence for Transgender Health, and the NYC HIV Prevention Planning Group. She received a Commendation of Excellence by the NYC Comptroller in 2009 for her outstanding work and research and was invited to the White House in 2013, as an emerging LGBT leader and a longtime Research consultant with NYC Department of Health. In 2014, Bali was named part of the Trans 100 by the Sylvia Rivera Law Project.
In her spare time Bali studies kathak, a classical north Indian dance form, and volunteers weekly at the Smithsonian Institution’s Cheetah Conservation Station.
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